briscoe-duke@CS.Yale.EDU (Duke Briscoe) (06/03/89)
KAZIC_T@wums.bitnet writes: > 4. The notion of hypertext applied to electronic publishing > is interesting, but I can envision it rapidly becoming > first, a Talmudic extravaganza as people dump their > immediate (not necessarily best) thoughts on line, and > slowly an unread resource as everyone gets tired of wading > through the commentary. These are exactly the problems which such a system would have to be designed to avoid. I think there are solutions. The most important way to avoid "a Talmudic extravaganza" is to have an editorial system which allows you to tailor what things you see. What you see does not have to be the same set of things which someone else sees. One idea would be to be a member of an editorial group, where new information linked to the group's area of interest is evenly distributed to members of the group, and a member makes decisions about the visibility of the information to the whole group. I think there are many ways of filtering to avoid the problem of information overload, but this is probably not the right forum to discuss them in. As to people dumping "their immediate (not necessarily best) thoughts on line", one desirable feature would be the ability to go back and edit something you have already posted, so that later readers will see an improved version. > People have problems all the time > when they 'clone by phone': the latest thing isn't what the > originator thinks it is, or it has some funny properties > that haven't yet come to light for the originator because > s/he doesn't do that kind of experiment, but the recipient > does . . . Would you really put the first or even fourth > version of your latest program out there? These kinds of tentative discussions would probably be held on a different "channel", and would be managed in a different manner than the less ephemeral parts of the hypertext medium. The kind of computer hardware which will be available at a reasonable price 5 to 10 years from now should be powerful enough to support the kind of graphical user interface and information filtering needed to make this kind of hypertext system usable. The main problem is to organize resources to do the software specification and development.