[Edited March 18, correcting quotes of Espen and descriptions of Mark's work] A few days ago, I clicked through all the nice slides (the amount of work!) in Mark Bernstein's Hypertext '99 keynote. It fired my dreams all over again. What inspired me to do this kind of stuff in the first place. The promises of Bush, of Nelson, of Apple's virtual museum, of an electronic realisation of Buzan's mindmaps (a note-taking technique I«ve been using since 1982), and ultimately, of the big-screen überbox.
A few years of Webbing, and the dream fades. As Gunnar once said to me, we have hypertext between documents, not in itself. A meta-hypertext, as it were. Espen (update your site!) calls hypertext an ideology (see later post), and finds it a bad sign for hypertext's future that so few use it for narrative and argument.
Notably, Mark Bernstein himself doesn't write a lot of hypertext (although he knows how to do it). He writes more papers, slide shows and a blog. Even as he said himself, the trouble with blogs is that dates rarely is a good way of organising material.
So, back to Mark's question. Where are the hypertexts? I know a few, and will list them here. I will look further. I have been a pro Web surfer for three years, after being a promising amateur for years. I know thousands of Web pages, but very few hypertexts. Where are they?
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