Hypertext Is In The Air

Michele Pasin discovers David Kolb's wonderful essay on Twin Media: Hypertext Under Pressure. He likes the use of Storyspace and Tinderbox for representing knowledge. "Very cool!", he says. "I think it’s interesting how these structures could resemble classes and relations in an ontology based system…without the hassle of taking out first order logic!"

Martin Spernau is excited by new Tinderbox work on automatic link discovery.

Mark Bernstein writes about something I deeply care for and have been experimenting with for a long time now: Automatically linking related/similar entries in a hypertext (eg a blog)

He observes that the academic papers on associative linking (including mine) can be dry and confusing. But perhaps it pays off in the end.

I've never been completely convinced by associative linking, even though for some years this was probably my best-received research. But these last experiments might be changing my mind: it's still computationally intensive, but blogging seems to be made for associative linking, and weblogs really, really benefit from links. The apprentice does some stupid things -- linking this week's sale to an old sale -- and sometimes it's just inscrutable, but at other times it seems to be at least as effective as an expert human.

SMGCT is struggling to find a good treatment of hypertext fiction. (She's been reading Writing for New Media, which is probably not the best starting point.)