www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA

After reading about Ted Nelson on Friday, I was very curious about his ‘Xanadu®’ Project and wanted to learn more about it.  Instead of reading about what it was, I wanted to look for a video that covered some basics about it so I could have some visual reference about the idea.  I came across the above video which was done by Ted Nelson himself and found it very enlightening, although it’s only 7 minutes long. I don’t believe the uploader is associated with Nelson or the video, but I was glad that they made it available on YouTube.

In the description was a link to the website for Xandadu® which has a small program that showed off what the project aims to accomplish. When downloading it I was hoping that it was more than just a demo and you could create documents that shared these “floating links” that Nelson described in the video, but actually you’re just shown a demo and you can only move the camera in 3D space to view how the sample documents connect. Above is a screenshot of me trying it out before writing this blog post. All those purple lines are blocks of text that connect the main document to the others.  I believe his idea is similar to reading a textbook and the sources that are referenced at the bottom would pop up next to page you’re reading.  Just a small example of how I interpret his ideas and I think it’s a very interesting thought.  Much more involved than simply linking the page at the bottom of say, a Wikipedia article.

His main idea for Xanadu® seems to be about (5:20 in the video):

• Transclusion
• Parallelism
• Generalized media format

I’d be very curious to see how the internet would’ve turned out if he had all of his ideas implemented.  If you’re interested in seeing more about how this works, I’d recommend downloading the XanaduSpace program from the official website linked above.  It only takes about 5 minutes to see everything, but is a good visual aide for understanding his ideas.

– Paul