 This presentation is called Wither the Web. I'm curious how many of you took the negative direction as in, like, withering when you read it? Like, didn't your mind just go, like, oh, yeah, well, it is kind of falling apart? Or if it was, like, yeah, it's going that way. Nobody took it the net. One person did. It was supposed to be a joke. I'm big blue hat online. I'm not actually a human being. This is just my avatar. I'm actually a hat. I work for John Wiley and Sons. I'm a solutions architect. We do strategy and stuff inside the company and do open source policy and exciting things with legal departments and all kinds of people. I formally edited the W3C annotation data model spec. If you have questions about it, please come talk to me. It'll get a mention or two in here as well. I'm also co-chairing the JSON-LD working group, which is what web annotations are built with. And also working on an ARIA annotation spec for annotations in HTML that you and I need to talk about then. It's drafty, and it's the exclamation mark. And working in the web publishing group, if none of you are doing W3C stuff yet, also please come talk to me. These are a good group of people, and we're trying to move all of these technologies towards a place of interoperability. Yeah, that'll come up again later. But publishing is a key part of that because you want stability in your content in order to annotate it. Also, core committer on Apache Annotator, which is something I hope to hack on tomorrow at the hack day do-a-thon. I like that new tagline. Randall and I will be there. He's also an Apache Annotator committer. And we're hoping to make those modules for the browser to make it easier to annotate in Chrome and other such things. So first information management proposal is probably the tagline you've heard for Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the web. This presentation is a very brief history of my experience with that proposal and several of the other people that led to that over the course of more than three decades, over the course of, like, 50, 60 years. Mostly it's these guys, Svanavar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee. We're going to take them in reverse order of my experience with them, but the right order in historical chronology. My experience finding them, I found Tim first, then Ted, then Doug, then Svanavar. And it happened because I landed on Tim Berners-Lee's design issues, which is a lovely circa 80s looking green site. You'll see it later in all its loveliness. It looks the exact same as when I found it in 95. And I read that thing thoroughly and it changed my life. I now do stuff at the W3C, as you saw, and know this gentleman and other things. And kind of got to this place where after having read that and altered my web development career towards these ideas, I had no idea that that's where I would end up, but through happenstance and finding, catching the passion of these four gentlemen led me here. So this is Svanavar. How many of you have read, as we may think? Top to bottom whole thing? Did you annotate it? Yes. Of course you did. You don't count. You annotated everything. That's how we know how many web pages there are, because Heather's annotated them. So the MIMEX features highly as his proposal in the end of this document, as we may think in the Atlantic circa 1945. What else happened in 45? You want to call out something? Anything significant? End of the war. End of the war, right? Yeah, so it's a promising date for humanity. And this article is a mix of promise and despair in a nice cocktail, perhaps. These are some quotes that I'm just going to straight read, because he wrote them better than I could paraphrase them. We seem to be worse off than before, for we can enormously extend the record. Yet even in its present bulk, we can hardly consult it. Did that feel like you this morning when you're like, where's that damn agenda? Like, I got to get to what's the address? Like, where do I go for this? And how about that email that they need for me for work? Like, you can send email faster than you can find email. You can send tweets faster than you can find that cat photo. We're still there, and in fact, it's just worse and faster. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. Does that sound like what you want on a daily basis? Like, it should be more stable, because I put it in the computer. But is it, really? Like, have we found it? I mean, Heather's got all kinds of success with annotating and finding stuff again. I always feel like all the arrows point away from me. Like, I'm making stuff. I'm sending stuff. I'm tweeting. But it's leaving me. It's not ever coming back. And I have to do a lot of work to go find that. So it's fun to create on computers, but it still is not this lovely mahogany button-laden desk that I punched up into. And I feel like I remember everything I've forgotten. Holding new forms of encyclopedias will appear ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the MIMEX, and they are amplified. Vannevar even had an idea of sharing these things. There's a story of a made-up story, because the MIMEX never happened, of two gentlemen discussing bow architecture from European long bows to Turkish short bows. And they have this debate. And he goes on a research trail and records all this stuff. And it keeps track of the trail of knowledge, not just what he found in the notes he took, but also the interconnections of how he got there, which you do as you browse. Your browser has a web history, but you can't ever visualize that, mostly because I haven't written the extension yet. But it's there, right? You know, your browser could know, you clicked this link to get to that link, and it was on this date at this time. And this browser full of 300 tabs actually has a whole web in itself of knowledge and how you got to that knowledge. These are the trails that Vannevar was envisioning in 1945. Can you tell them of the MIMEXs? It's a lovely mahogany desk full of buttons. That's it right here. So on one side you read, and on the other side you write. And the little letters at the bottom were the hypermedia. You would record where you were, or you would look it up with a set of letters, and it would scroll through the stuff and stop at the page of information. And his hope was that you could later to share this photograph, the output of what you found, pull out a coil and hand it to the next person who would plug it in their lovely mahogany desk. I don't know why it's mahogany in my head. It might actually have been. No, it's mahogany already. Is it mahogany? Okay, good. Mahogany's pretty. So I'm gonna break from the four white dudes for a minute and introduce you to this lovely person. This is Angela Robles. This is 1949. This is only a few years later. She invented and patented the mechanical encyclopedia. This is like a read-only mimics. You can't see it here, but this set of what looked like sewing spools run microfilm just like the mimics was envisioned to do horizontally and they can be scrolled independently so that you can look at parts of a book at different times and move between the glossary and the topic and the chapters and whatever. And she envisioned notebooks that you could write in and record stuff in the front and the back. And this swings out. This portion here swings out and there's a whole nother set of stuff on the back and it weighs no more than a normal book. All these great things. But the one she's holding there is made out of like metal. It's like a heavy thing. So we've moved on from mahogany to this, but it was meant to be portable. And for a lot of people, they see this as the first e-book reader. This was envisioned to be exactly that where publishers would publish these coils. You'd snap them into this book for whatever class you were going to next. You'd go back to your locker, pop out the coils, put in new ones, and move on to the next thing. Interestingly for me as a sideline, both the mimics and this mechanical encyclopedia used a lot of scrolling in the context of a paginated world. We still scroll on the web. Just a side thought. Then there's this happy guy. I really loved Gardner's video of the hands in the ears moment. That was wonderful. He is best known for graphs like this and wonderful acronyms. A lot of these gentlemen came up with fabulous words. We'll see another raft of them shortly. The thing Doug is best known for is the mother of all demos. If you haven't watched that, once these slides are online, go to this top mother of all demos link. The institute has broken them into sets of videos and you can jump around based on what topic you want to see, but I also highly recommend just sitting through it because you get to see the video stuff which was way ahead of its time working, but you also get to see it fail and their discussions about how do we get this thing back online and how do I, okay, are you online? Oh, yep, there you are. Oh, it's like, it's fascinating to just watch how ahead of the time it was and his keyboard setup is like a gamer's dream. He's got the one main like, QWERTY, I don't know that it was QWERTY, on his lap and then he's got this big ass mouse, but then he's got this five key QWERTY thing that he does all kinds of cool stuff with. Gamers do this all the time, right? Like any of you gamers in here, do you play strategy games, right? So you're always doing these keyboard QWERTY stuff, but that as part of an operating system, since the day I played StarCraft was what I wanted my OS to do. I wanted to get to this place where I was like, you know, there's a little task list in the corner, like you're gonna go beat the Zerg and you gotta do this, this and this. And you had all these keyboard shortcuts to make stuff and build stuff and command armies. And then you go to Windows and you're like, oh crap, like where is my stuff? Like where's my army? What am I supposed to do? Like where do I build things? I don't know. I have to think like, I'm gonna send an email. I can't send like, oh Dan, I wanna talk to Dan. No, I have to think, am I emailing an outlook these days or what am I using like the web mail? Oh crap, web mail's down. So now I gotta go, it's all these meta ideas. His other things include dynamic knowledge repository, open hyper document system. These will either sound like the memex or they'll sound like the web depending on which thing you knew about first. And in many ways, they are both of them and neither of them. They include ideas that are yet to be represented anywhere. Somebody else not in that first photo, Frode Hoagland, Haigland runs the future of text symposium and has for a long time. He did the, or helped do the demo at 50 where they last December rewatched the demo with lots of people. I think Gardner mentioned this actual event. I sadly didn't make it. But he's working towards increasing community around these ideas to see how far we can get them. Most of them are built out of web technologies but they're trying to backfill that difference between Doug's ideas and how far Tim got us. Then there's this lovely fellow. If you've ever watched his videos or haven't, you need to. He's doing them regularly now on archive.org with feedback and talk backs if you have questions. It's a great time. I was on one with Dan. I think the first one a few months ago, that was a lot of fun. He likes words, screw acronyms. He's gonna make up a new word for everything. Just about, I didn't even put them all up here. Hypertext and hypermedia are the ones that you have probably used today or will before the end of the day. Transclusion is one that we still want. Most people are doing it with JavaScript and JSON by pulling in content from an API or somebody else's document and sticking it in that document. Ted envisioned that more completely as the way all documents were built. So you had your additions but really every document was an annotation. It was an annotation of all other content that was composed at the time of your reading but it needed permanent identifiers. It needed the ability to sub-select into smaller chunks of a content. And he envisioned a whole economic system around how you would pay each other for these quotations. It is complete and beautiful and you must birth it from your head like Athena in order to actually get it to exist which is why it still doesn't, presumably. He continues to try and it's by far the reason I wake up and attack my hardest problems because he is still after this, after all these years and it's a beautiful thing. Virtuality, inter-twingularity, that's just a fun one to say, and the Docuverse are all essential components and concepts that made it into Tim's web which is what you're using now. We still lack Transclusion but we'll get there. This is Project Xanadu which was the one that I mentioned made of annotations composed into single documents. It envisioned a 3D space in which you would move between these documents and close read the entire world in hyperspace, really, in fact. And it's a lot to take in and it's still back to Vannevar's we're overwhelmed with all the data we have in 1945. We got to a place of collaboration in science where we did good things and bad things but we did them really well and really efficiently because we could talk to each other and because we worked together and could understand in new ways and shared in new ways, more importantly, the corpus of knowledge that we had access to and they had access to it. And after the war that got less and less a thing until, again, the military, funded the creation of the internet and the research around that which ultimately got us to the web. The zigzag logo is probably one of my favorite logos ever. Feels like it should be on a superhero's chest. And it is a document format that I can't explain. I've heard Ted say it multiple times and it's amazing to hear him say it but it's, yeah, hyperdimensional. We'll leave it at that. Go look up these things. They all have dedicated websites and his information on them is inspiring if nothing else. And then there's Tim, or Timble, Tim Biel to his friends, I guess. Sir Tim is the person who got us the web by writing this paper, Information Management Proposal 1989. So we started the story in 1945. We're now at 1989. We have another lovely graph with lots of lines. Not quite as chaotic as Doug's, but mostly. Half of the things mentioned on this graph are now gone and some of them forgotten. I was briefly an IBMer and while there I was writing a paper on this and dug into what IBM Group Talk was. There was no record internally at IBM of what it was. The name got reused about 10 years after this was published for a group wear thing maybe. But before that, I still to this day don't know what Tim was referencing there but apparently it was a product people were using attempting to be some sort of news because it's an example, a hierarchical system and it does computer conferencing. But that's the most I know about it because Tim wrote this paper. Vax Notes is a thing you can read about on Wikipedia. You can't use it anymore. Hypercard is a thing maybe some of you bumped into on the Mac and other places that was this dreamy hypertext system that was not webby but hypertext as you saw on the chronology predates the web and people were doing it successfully for knowledge bases for help content for all kinds of things. Hypercard is one. Inquire was Tim's first crack at the web. Inquire within upon everything. It was named for an 1800s era daily use how-to guide about stuff like how to trim candle wicks and crazy things. So he had this book growing up and he named the software after that. And you could type in information and it would scroll through your notes and get you to where you're going and had a lot of hints towards what in this he calls mesh which later becomes the web. This is that design issues page I mentioned in the lovely greenish Hwaye color. This is not even half of the list of links. This is maybe a third of them. I've read most of them top to bottom. If you have time for just one I would hit web architecture from 50,000 feet. That's probably the one because it was in bold for some reason that I read first. And he updates occasionally some of these. You can see 2017 has some there's some farther down he updated last year. It's a great way to get Tim's information and backstory on why he did what he did in the web. Some of it's social pragmatic like here's why I made these choices. Here's what I tried. Some of it is this is still the vision. There's a set of axioms about like one is URLs should be opaque like you shouldn't actually the machine shouldn't actually care about what's in the URL itself. So you can then have freedom to construct it in whatever way you want as a human being. And there's all kinds of great stuff in here but this inspired me at 16 to change the course of my life. And I went from graphic design and video games and to web standards and video games. So because you have to be inspired for interface design if you're gonna sit at these desktops all day. Then there was this. Anybody read the article about the semantic web in 2001? This was another pivot in my history because I had read Tim's stuff and design issues and knew that his vision was way bigger than the little web pages I was clicking on and the bulletin board systems I was, or the forums online I was entering data into and it had something to do with this graphy knowledge thing and finding this description which was very heady and very beautifully impossible about robots solving all our problems because we had given them enough information to book our travel which still doesn't happen. It's all there and it's rich potential in this like two and a half page article which you can pay $7.99 for a PDF on Scientific America if you want it. I picked up that one for free and somebody had left it in the back of an airliner seat and I found it and it changed my world. There's a slightly distilled version of the semantic web called linked data which is a similar idea but also back to Vannevar's Mimics moments. That's a heck of a lot to take in and that's not even the tip of the iceberg. This is just linked open data. This is not all the linked data at Wiley or everything in Google social graph or the knowledge graph or Facebook's graph or any of these graphs but what linked data does as a practice, excuse me, is attempt to move the ideas of the semantic web from an AI enhanced massive machinery to a simple concept of linking back to how the web is built from, let's link the data not just the pages. Let's point at the same sort of identifiers. When we're talking about a person's first name, if we can map our vocabularies for first name across languages and ontologies into the same sort of verb, then we can all talk about first names programmatically in a way that we can merge our data together and understand it in ways that we couldn't in the past. This is where Jason LD comes in for me. Now he's working on solid which is a re-centering of the programming world and software and web concepts around an individual. I call this egocentric architecture. He brings the person back into the middle and brings the data to the person. So you store your data in what he calls a pod. Personal online data I think is what it stands for or database. And then apps are permitted with your permission, not theirs, to access that data. So it pivots us from moving in a space of brands and apps and to-do list apps. How many of you have used more than 15 to-do list apps? No, more than 15. Okay, more than 15? I mean, we all use to-do list apps. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you try them, right? And you get about like 10 items in them and they're like, this just isn't working. And so you start over and it's a different list and now you've lost like all your data because it's in all these different apps. Some of them are around, some of them aren't, et cetera. So in this idea, all 15 of those to-do list apps would store in your pod in some sort of linked data format that would keep track of those to-dos and switching to a new to-do list item wouldn't mean you switched your data. It would just mean you switched the interface and the capabilities provided by that application. We'll see if the economic arguments can be made and whether or not this sticks. I hope it does either in concept or in practicalities. Speaking of robots, the robots styled half of these slides including these new colorful ones at the end of my deck. There's a design ideas thing and PowerPoint now and you click it and it restyles all your slides. I thought that was kind of neat. It didn't tell me any new information but it did give me some pretty colors. But the yellow was a bad choice. It looks okay up there. Over there it's like hard to read. Yeah. These are things that I learned personally from these gentlemen over the years. Ego-centric architecture is personal and mental augmentation that we got from Doug mostly, also Vannebar that we're extracting and augmenting, extracting our information and augmenting our ability to find it so that we can more quickly execute on the things that we actually want to do which is not muck around in our email. It's not browse Facebook. It's actually to talk to that person you need to talk to or buy that thing you need to buy or shut it all off and go for a walk or play with the kids, et cetera. They also talked about network collaboration and wanted to combine these personally empowered individuals to collaborate and create better forms of communities, better forms of organizations and ultimately a better world for each other. New types of content communication, we briefly saw Zigzag and Project Xanadu, the ability to compose documents out of other documents, the ability to traverse those documents in a hyperspace, all kinds of ideas that nothing else can inspire and point us in good directions. One of the ones I'm grappling with right now is interdependent content versus resilient or lack of resilient retrieval. The reason the web works so well is because there's a thing called a 404 error. As weird as that sounds, because that's the thing you hate to see most, it is why you can link to anything even if it's dead and gone or will be the next time you click the link. It is the thing that made Tim's web work better than all the other hypertext systems predating it because they required that things be tied together in such a stable way that you could always traverse it, which is really what you want as a human being, but you can never guarantee it of someone else. So to be able to link cross-organizationally or into a corpus that is no longer extant, you have to risk a 404 every time you make a link and he enabled that by saying, yeah, you don't have to guarantee that you can land there. You get it when you get it, you got to it and you're marking it and he has a whole interface for moving between windows and you've highlighted something, annotating it basically, going to the next window and say, okay, that's what I'm linking to and it would create a link. So you got there, you saw it, but then it leaves. The link's still there. You still have some amount of information that this happened, this was a thing. And as an anthropologist, armchair anthropologist, I really appreciate the fact that there's still this data on the web even though whole domains have changed hands multiple times and loads of my GeoCities content is gone forever. I still know it's there, because I still linked to it or it was there, right? There's still information about what has been. It's breadcrumbs, it's not great, it's not perfect, but it allowed the web to evolve and be what it is today, brittle and beautiful. All of them, especially Ms. Robles with her mechanical encyclopedia, envisioned greater human flourishing and access to knowledge and the ability to put as much information as many hands because they hoped for human flourishing and they hoped that people given that power would benefit the other people given that power rather than take it. But that's not really what happened. These are some other thoughts on document centrism. There's no apps or brands in any of these people's work. It's all about content and documents and sharing information. You don't buy an app. You don't pay for a logo. You don't, you're dealing with documents and you see that in SOLID. SOLID has shifted the model to the data and the documents are now away from the brands and the brands can sell you interfaces and cooler cameras and emojis on people's heads and whatever else they might wanna sell you, but you get to keep the documents in the pure content. They all tried to make things easily createable for publishers as well as individuals. Many of them have ideas around unique identifiability. The ability to say this content is this content. So when we all talk about it, it's called this through URLs, URIs, IRIs, on and on. Identifiers of some kind. And they wanted everything to be quickly retrievable and not just all of it. Not how one point Vannevar talks about a bus laden with all of humanity's knowledge because it was so compressible that we could put it in a van which is kind of cool and he's totally right because I have one in my pocket right now. But it's not all that data. I just can get at all that data more or less. But they wanted the ability to bring it all in to have in your mimics, whatever shape that takes in your life, the opportunity to collect it and see it and use it to an end and not be overwhelmed by it. They also envisioned cross-organizational distributability, which is another thing that Tim really achieved by building on top of DNS was the opportunity to leveraging what email allowed people to do which was email each other and communicate across corporate boundaries which was novel when email showed up. He took that and made it possible for documents to exist in the same realms and for you to point into them based on their authority. And then hopefully, this one's less true still but annotation points strongest to this one. The opportunity to inter-twingle the content, to annotate and extract and remix and republish and show a new trail in Vannevar's words, to path a new way and say, this is what I understand. And not just, he mentions the master giving the disciple not just the data points that the master knows but how the master got to those conclusions and all the painful research he went through or she in this massive corpus. So yes, the disciple gets the data point but he's also got all the tones the master had to read if he wants to go re-compare, which is wonderful. So now to the bleak bit, what's in the way of all this? Why don't we have NMXs? Why do we use 15 plus to-do apps? Why are we dealing with brands on our desktops and not human beings faces? Windows interestingly is shifting some of this. They're trying to make people more visible. They're trying to show you more ways to move between your windows but your windows are still contained in application space not thought space, not I'm working on this project. I have the people, I have the tables, I have the documents and they're all here because I'm working on my I Annotate presentation. Now I have tabs for I Annotate and video game deals and my trip to Charleston with my wife this weekend all in the same browser and they're just kind of intertwangled but not in a way that I want them to be. So another Vannevar quote, presumably man's spirit should be elevated. If he can better review his shady past, by this he's not meaning all the bad things you did when you were in college. He's meaning the shady hidden past, the things that you've gone through that you no longer quite remember and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down partway there by overexhausting his limited memory. That's like me every time I turn on my phone. It's like, oh my goodness, like which shiny thing do I wanna touch? And why did I turn this on? Like there's not a space to put your thought before you get greeted with everyone else's thought and everyone else's notification. And half of those everyone else's aren't human beings. They're apps and brands and things that want your attention. And attention surveillance capitalism was mentioned. The other phrase that I really hate to love is attention brokers or love to hate. That's where we are now and it's potentially our future unless we can shift the incentives and the economic models around why we create stuff and what we do with our memexes and how we think our thoughts. One more than a bar quote. The applications of science may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. And by race he's talking about the human race and everything we experience as a tribe of bipeds. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process or to lose hope as to the outcome. We are so dang close like to all of those including the conflict and perishing from it. And that's the thing that we feel acutely and feel unempowered to solve and to change. What is needed? How do we go from here? How do we face down the conflict and the overwhelmingness while still hanging onto this hope at the bottom of Pandora's box? Which is the thing at the bottom of the box. I don't know if you knew that. Everybody talks about Pandora's box and oh yeah, it's all like demons and stuff and it's just awful. Don't open Pandora's box. What she finds in the bottom is hope to go on to the next thing. This is not enough. This is just the pieces I touch. But collaboration above the groups listed is the thing that I have seen most often work towards success. Tim didn't sell us the web. He gave us the web. He wrote information management and proposal. Sat and his managers, for lack of a better word, desk drawer for a while because it was vague and exciting. And eventually he got permission to do it and they did it and they gave it away and it runs today. You're using it now. Hopefully annotating something. These groups, Apache Annotator, the open annotation community group at the W3C, annotating all knowledge. These are annotation centric collaborations. If you are doing annotation as a user, as a developer, as someone participant in the world of knowledge and annotating it, please participate in one of these. Please show up and complain about things. Please, please, please show up with a new economic model that puts documents and data in the center of the world and not brands and other things. There are egocentric architecture things happening. Solid activity pub is taking the world quietly by storm as mastodon and peer tube and all kinds of other interesting peer-to-peer sharing, RSS-like enabled distribution of content between people who are just tired of Twitter and Facebook. Web annotation protocol wanted to do this for annotations. With more implementations, it would do that. Adam and RSS continue despite browsers and search engines bad choices to remove it from visibility on the web. They're still there, they still work. Podcasters will say nothing but good things about RSS. Although there are applications working to collect those RSS feeds and produce, you know, Netflix-only content for their podcasts. Be leery of that kind of thing. Web annotation for interop. You don't have to use web annotation in your annotation app. I can say that, I helped write it. When you need to use web annotation is when you're talking to the next person. You don't have to base your entire app on that data model until you wanna give it to somebody else or until you wanna take their annotations and put them in your system. That's the point of standards. It's not innovation, it's standardization, it's consistency, it's interoperability. That's why it exists. So don't fear it, don't be like I read it and it didn't work for me. It doesn't need to work for you. It needs to work for you and whoever you're working with next. That's the point. It's the interstitial glue, the annotation on the technology. And build the mimics you want to see in the world. I think Gandhi said that. So thank you everyone. And these links will be online someplace soon. So does anyone have any questions for Benjamin before he slinks away? It's fine if you don't. Were you a hypercard user? Only briefly. I was too busy playing that little spinny stick game on the IMAX, well they weren't IMAX at the time. Oh, the question, was I a hypercard user? I did briefly use it, I did build some applications. It is probably one of the first things that piqued my interest and to jump links to use Ted's phrasing. The ability to build something to just bounce around within that was so fluid and messy. But that predated even my finding design issues and things like that. So it was just like, oh that's a cool thing you can do with computers. But then at home I had a PC. So I only used it a little at school. Yeah. Great, well thank you Benjamin for that inspiring romp through web history. Sure.