From Wired magazine. Information wants to be liquid.
The web as we know it was invented by a British academic working in Switzerland. Is a Nordic academic working in Britain about to redefine it forever?
Frode Hegland, a researcher at University College London, wants to change the basic structure of information on the net.
Hegland's project, Liquid Information, is kinda like Wikipedia meets hypertext. In Hegland's web, all documents are editable, and every word is a potential hyperlink.
Engelbart refers to Hegland's project as "the next stage of the web."
It's called Phase 2.
Hegland's idea is simple -- he plans to move beyond the basic hypertext linking of the web, and change every word into a "hyperword." Instead of one or two links in a document, every single word becomes a link. Further, every link can point to more than one place, pulling up all kinds of background context from the web as a whole.
Click on a politician's name and find out who donated to his or her campaign. Click on a town name in a news story and find out what else has happened there.
The Liquid Information project's homepage proudly states, "You can think of this project as an effort to turn web 'browsers' into web 'readers.'
To see what it looks like go to CNN's site here. This is neat.
Seems a little bit cluttered. There comes a point where this is TOO mich information.
The concept can be transferred to the physical world though. Click on a barcode, or a Nike logo, or RFID tag to get more info.
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