A friend recently passed along this link, to a TED demo on Microsoft's work on Photosynth. When the folks at TED call this demo "jaw dropping," they're not kidding. If you have any interest at all in where digital media may be headed, or the possibilities for online narrative could go, you have to check this out.
In a historical vein, Kottke points our attention to Alex Wright's Glut. As Jason says, "Whoa." Guess Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic article, "As We May Think" wasn't the first articulation of the idea behind the Web. Rather, that honor belongs to a Belgian artist, Paul Otlet. Read Kottke's post for more, including a video of Otlet's presenting his ideas.
Finally, while doing a little searching on the history of hypertext novels (and Nabokov's Pale Fire often gets the nod, while I'd give it to Cortazar's Hopscotch, which came just a year later: it's not any more obviously intertextual--but it handles its intertextuality in a way which is much more like the way in which we browse the Web than Nabokov's sequentially straight-jacketed Pale Fire does), I came across this intriguing "History of Hypertext Timeline."
That Seadragon/Photosynth presentaton was brilliant. The presentation using Notre Dame as an example was an extremely well-conceived way to convey the potential of the software.
Posted by: Wyl | September 16, 2007 at 08:56 AM