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This is a somewhat interesting discussion about reviving Xanadu if you ignore the silly attempt at shoehorning blockchain into an application that doesn't need

This is a somewhat interesting discussion about reviving Xanadu if you ignore the silly attempt at shoehorning blockchain into an application that doesn't need it. A decade ago, I also tried and failed to create a compelling transclusion based system: http://www.bookvoid.com http://www.bookvoid.com I'm not sure why transclusion isn't popular. I think partly, it's because you get 90% of the benefits from using existing hyperlink based systems, partly because having visible URLs at the top of pages identifying a unique source of trust is necessary and mixing content from different sources into a single page would be too confusing and introduce too many security issues, and partly because it is too much of an effort for typical readers to navigate a hierarchical and intertwined structures of information. While I may like to explore information by uncollapsing fragments and hyperlinked documents to reveal a level of details and collection of sources that I choose myself, a lot of people seem to prefer to be shepherded through linear top to bottom narrative tailored to their level of proficiency and purpose. This explains the popularity of video sources like Khan academy. Reference websites such as wikipedia would be prime candidates for the use of transclusion and Xanadu like layouts and I suppose they use some of it already. For example, last time a used wikipedia's mobile app, it collapsed sections and allow them to be opened inline. But for some reason I can't pinpoint, more genuine Xanadu like integrations fail to catch on.

mncharity 8y ago
> I'm not sure why transclusion isn't popular. [...] Perhaps the tool-and-community bootstrap challenge is sufficient explanation? It was clear for years that USENET news needed comment voting, but its community never really made the attempt. Progress came from moving elsewhere, eg HN. Consider selective comment display as a limited form of transclusion. Why doesn't HN have more highly personalized views? Sometimes you want quality, but it's obscured by chatter. Sometimes you would like to chat, but that would obscure quality from others. So we're at very not 90% of benefit; not a security issue; and far more effort for both readers and mods. But the better code doesn't exist yet. And community expectations don't demand it -- users might abandon a "no comment voting? - so broken" site, but "I can't even do basic reputation filtering?" isn't an expectation yet. Or consider the largely unsuccessful effort of the late-80's hypertext community to shape the development of the "that's not right" WWW. Including "this has become funny" multiple Xanadu attempts. Path-dependent local incentives seemed to dominate instead. But if one bottleneck is ease of exploring non-linear information, perhaps help may come from VR's relaxing of screen real estate constraints, providing more elbow room for low-overhead speculative UI content and associated assistive agents?
mimixco 8y ago
I mention the blockchain because it (potentially) serves a purpose. It's a verifiable, write-only storage method that can be easily shared among people yet still remain privately controlled. Those are unique attributes! If we look beyond cryptos to blockchain apps that store textual data (as they all really do), there might be a use case for blockchain with what we call canonical documents in Mimix. I'm not married to the idea and there's no buzzword fishing here. Mimix does not involve a token economy or altcoin. I must disagree that linking is a 90% substitute for what Ted called tranclusion. Linking is nothing more than the electronic version of the library card catalog. Linking does not help the user find the context of the referenced material nor help him or her to "link" back to his or her own writing later from that reference material. These were the goals of Nelson's transclusion and they're also part of what we're building with Mimix. As to the paucity of modern education, I agree with the results but not the reason. I don't think people prefer low-quality information. But I do think that corporations and governments prefer to supply that. We need tools to help us Think Better, as we have since Vannevar Bush first proposed his Memex in the 40's. The opportunity to give students and teachers more fine-grained and more accurate access to information can only help raise up the individual to a more powerful place in society. You are 100% right about Wikipedia. It's low-hanging fruit for canon. Many other datasets are, too, such as the legal documents, free books, and artworks offered by academic institutions. The trick is to integrate those works into the Mimix users' new, original, writing and the purpose of Mimix is to enable and simplify that integration in a way that was never before possible.

mncharity 8y ago

> I'm not sure why transclusion isn't popular. [...] Perhaps the tool-and-community bootstrap challenge is sufficient explanation? It was clear for years that USENET news needed comment voting, but its community never really made the attempt. Progress came from moving elsewhere, eg HN. Consider selective comment display as a limited form of transclusion. Why doesn't HN have more highly personalized views? Sometimes you want quality, but it's obscured by chatter. Sometimes you would like to chat, but that would obscure quality from others. So we're at very not 90% of benefit; not a security issue; and far more effort for both readers and mods. But the better code doesn't exist yet. And community expectations don't demand it -- users might abandon a "no comment voting? - so broken" site, but "I can't even do basic reputation filtering?" isn't an expectation yet. Or consider the largely unsuccessful effort of the late-80's hypertext community to shape the development of the "that's not right" WWW. Including "this has become funny" multiple Xanadu attempts. Path-dependent local incentives seemed to dominate instead. But if one bottleneck is ease of exploring non-linear information, perhaps help may come from VR's relaxing of screen real estate constraints, providing more elbow room for low-overhead speculative UI content and associated assistive agents?

mimixco 8y ago

I mention the blockchain because it (potentially) serves a purpose. It's a verifiable, write-only storage method that can be easily shared among people yet still remain privately controlled. Those are unique attributes! If we look beyond cryptos to blockchain apps that store textual data (as they all really do), there might be a use case for blockchain with what we call canonical documents in Mimix. I'm not married to the idea and there's no buzzword fishing here. Mimix does not involve a token economy or altcoin. I must disagree that linking is a 90% substitute for what Ted called tranclusion. Linking is nothing more than the electronic version of the library card catalog. Linking does not help the user find the context of the referenced material nor help him or her to "link" back to his or her own writing later from that reference material. These were the goals of Nelson's transclusion and they're also part of what we're building with Mimix. As to the paucity of modern education, I agree with the results but not the reason. I don't think people prefer low-quality information. But I do think that corporations and governments prefer to supply that. We need tools to help us Think Better, as we have since Vannevar Bush first proposed his Memex in the 40's. The opportunity to give students and teachers more fine-grained and more accurate access to information can only help raise up the individual to a more powerful place in society. You are 100% right about Wikipedia. It's low-hanging fruit for canon. Many other datasets are, too, such as the legal documents, free books, and artworks offered by academic institutions. The trick is to integrate those works into the Mimix users' new, original, writing and the purpose of Mimix is to enable and simplify that integration in a way that was never before possible.