Howard Rheingold writes on online communities and technology's social effects, and hosts texts such as Tools for Thought and The Virtual Community.
HN commenters cite his work for the history of computing and online communities, and recommend his book Net Smart on intentional use of digital media.
Multimedia and HyperText: The Internet and Beyond, by Jakob Nielsen, SunSoft (1995).
https://books.google.nl/books?id=KgZXCCfP0rQC&pg=PA469&lpg=PA469&dq=%22NaviText+SAM%22&source=bl&ots=OIpk-ZClGi&sig=ACfU3U3Yj2_iAht2rueCrn-CVuWw1I8K1w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwinsb6kp7D1AhUP-6QKHaKXDvMQ6AF6BAgTEAM#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Jakob-Nielsen/dp/0125184085/ref=sr_1_1?crid=360LNDHJNLLLT&keywords=Multimedia+and+HyperText%3A+The+Internet+and+Beyond&qid=1642133996&sprefix=multimedia+and+hypertext+the+internet+and+beyond%2Caps%2C77&sr=8-1
I hadn't come across this book before, but I popped for the Kindle edition, and found an excerpt about HyperTIES. It also goes into fascinating detail about many other early hypermedia systems. Jakob Nielsen writes deep well-researched books and articles about usability and user interface design, and he gives excellent talks and keynotes! (He's aka "guru of Web page usability", "king of usability", and "usability Pope", but definitely not "usability Godfather"! ;) )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consultant)
https://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/
His raises important points about Hyperties' design being focused on ease-of-use by museum visitors and ease-of-authoring by museum curators and historians, the simple consistent keyboard interface, configurable link colors, and the definition window at the bottom of the screen that previews descriptions of link targets in context before you even visit…
I'm following my own advice there at the end and browsing around a bit more, and one book dynamicland links to on their bookshelf (https://dynamicland.org/2024/Roots/) is "Tools for Thought" (https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/) which has this amazing blurb which reminded me of this thread:
> Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story. Yes, the tales of teenagers inventing new industries in their garages were good stories. But the idea of the personal computer did not spring full-blown from the mind of Steve Jobs. Indeed, the idea that people could use computers to amplify thought and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was not an invention of the mainstream computer industry nor orthodox computer science, nor even homebrew computerists. If it wasn't for people like J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, it wouldn't have happened. But their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work, so I went back to piece together how Boole and Babbage and Turing and von Neumann — especially von Neumann — created the foundations that the later toolbuilders stood upon to create the future we live in today. You can't understand where…
I assume you mean recent and active projects; there's nothing recent I can remember that attempts to do the kind of thing I tried to describe in the second paragraph of my comment. (Which is why I intend to start working on my own modest, desperate attempt at it in the following months.)
However, there are various projects, some of them historical, that have attempted to tackle it in limited contexts, or implemented parts of it, or have envisioned it in holistic systems that are now outdated. Almost all of the somewhat interesting ones I've come across can unfortunately be classified as one of the following: 1) Productized, narrowly focused yet-another-app 2) Academic or overly specialized in-house or personal project with no real effort at widespread usability 3) Unmaintained and outdated 4) Essentially vaporware
With that said, here are a few links of interest, with the forefathers noted first:
* Xanadu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
* NLS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29
* Relations: http://relations-rcp.sourceforge.net/
* Zettelkasten: http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/index.php
* semantic-notes: https://github.com/jsomers/semantic-notes
* Synapsen: http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen/shots_e.html
* flashbake: https://github.com/commandline/flashbake
* ConnectedText: http://www.connectedtext.com/
* The Literary Machine: http://sommestad.com/lm.htm
* Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html
* Smart…
That man knows how to flounce. Much respect.
I should note that the concern isn't without merit. If you read Howard Rheingold's "The Virtual Community" which is one of the earliest discourses on Internet and online community, the concept of "virtual suicide" isn't new.
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/1.html
In this case, someone created a tool to eradicate their online identity, then did the same in real life.
I've had this issue twice in my 16 years of running Murmurs.com. In one case, the person was in chat on a Sunday and threatened suicide before deleting all her posts. We had to track down her university police department and they found her on the lawn outside her dorm overdosing on sleeping pills.
The other was more sad. The guy disappeared and posts were removed. Only later did we find that he had left his suicide note on Flickr. He was Norwegian and we had to do a lot of digging to find more info. In the end his mom emailed me a very poorly translated English message, and it was heartbreaking.
The moral is: I don't think there was any over reaction. This pattern has precedent and not a good one. I've never felt that in my 16 years of doing online community work I've ever over-reacted when I saw this behavior transpire.
In one case we saved someone's life, and in the other we didn't.
Our modern-day nomenclature owes a lot to the 'arrays' and 'threads' that made up these weaving machines (see Howard Rheinhold's Tools for Thought)[0].
Evidently, the punch cards that stored Jacquard's weaving patterns were a direct inspiration for Babbage's analytical engine.
[0]: https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/02.html#:~:text=The%20weaving%20machines%20used%20arrays%20of%20metal%20rods%20to%20automatically%20pull%20threads%20into%20position.%20To%20create%20patterns%2C%20Jacquard%27s%20device%20interposed%20a%20stiff%20card%2C%20with%20holes%20punched%20in%20it%2C%20between%20the%20rods%20and%20the%20threads
Another example of prior art would be the Electric Minds community, which was an offshoot of the Well in the mid-90s, and took the best and brightest people in certain fields to moderate online communities within that topic area. The people were "famous" in a certain space (although not to the average person-in-the-street).
See http://www.rheingold.com/electricminds/html/