Ted Nelson - Poet, Philosopher and Rogue

One of the great things about my job is that I get to meet people who are smart, interesting, inspiring, legendary, (at least in some circles), challenging and from time to time some or all of the above.

Yesterday my colleagues and I (all four of us) spent a few illuminating hours with Ted Nelson.
He immediately endeared himself to me be mentioning his LP and his claim (as yet undisputed apparently) to have written and staged the first Rock Musical. I raised a rye smile as I considered my own album releases and the unfinished Punk Rock Musical project I've been chipping away at in odd moments over the last five or six years.

Ted Nelson has been called "one of the most influential contrarians in the history of the information age." (Edwards, 1997), and I can see why.

Ted declared himself "Poet, Philosopher and Rogue" at the age of 16, a description I'd say holds true to this day and is probably as apposite a semantic tag as one might hope to find for him.

Credited with coining the term Hypertext, and imagining a system of deep document interconnection as expressed in Project Xanadu - the Web appears to him a real missed opportunity.

As someone who has an active interest in trying to kill the browser and the application I have a great deal of sympathy for his thinking - and I can see also why it annoys so many people.
What was particularly interesting was that some of Ted's ideas gave my colleagues and I an alternative framework for understanding, debating and enhancing some of our own ideas, which are increasingly in conflict with or at least straining at the boundaries of the conventions of current Internet and computing.

I've always had a soft spot for people who force the re-evaluation of accepted truths!

Even the areas of The Semantic Web, Web as a Platform, SOA and Grid computing I am currently engaged in, though seemingly rewriting so many rules and conventions, don't seek to look at so many of the fundamentals.

Do I agree with everything Ted says - well no and I think some of his assertions need reassessing as technology has plugged some of the gaps he sees, for instance there are contemporary examples of cut and paste being reflected by visual moving of text from one place to another - but the sanity of transclusion vs linking, unbreakable links, origin connection, two-way links, deep version management and incremental publishing for example, does strike a chord and offer solutions to some of the short comings of the web as it stands that annoy me on a daily basis.

So, I'm now digging deeper into his ideas and going back to basics and having another read of Vannevar Bush etc and trying to rebuild my own opinions and conclusions of IT from the ground up.

Whether Ted Nelson is wrong or right in his thinking, isn't important to me right now, the spur to reassess my own perceptions is!

--> Wikipedia entry
--> Ted's Webby
--> Project Xanadu
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