I've never heard Tim Berners-Lee's invention of http and html described as a "laboratory accident in Switzerland" before...
Posted by DeLong at February 17, 2004 11:08 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postDue Diligence: Technorati > Xanadu: As we all know, Ted Nelson meant hypertexts to have bidirectional links. But due to a laboratory accident in Switzerland, we ended up with this lame thing. Mechanisms such as Google link search and Technorati are just hacks, ways to leverage Moore's Law to ameliorate a fundamental flaw in our hypertext data architecture, crawling the Web faster and faster to aggregate all of our trackbacks.
Yesterday, David Sifry convinced me that's just wrong. What Nelson missed, with his focus on 'literary' architectures, is that networked hypertexts are inhabited by people. Links are not just citations. They are gestures in a social space, parts of conversations or other interactions. There's an inherent value in looking at the dynamics of the record as it is created.
Given you're never going to get a distributed, social system to agree to deposit all of its meta-data in one place, crawlers are an necessary part of supporting the conversation. Further, knowing that the data stream is produced by groups of people gives traction for analysis based on social network theories, to augment the traditional information retrieval and citation analysis that may have reached its limits in coping with the scale of the Web. Most likely (my inference) that same network theory will suggest more efficient ways to both crawl and index what is found.
Best pitch award for Tuesday: David Sifry of Technorati.
Brad
You're probably too young to remember, but LSD was the result of a "laboratory accident in Switzerland" at least according to Thomas Pynchon in "Gravity's Rainbow."
Posted by: Jim Shirk on February 17, 2004 11:15 AMIndeed I am too young to remember. Another allusion caught!
Posted by: Brad DeLong on February 17, 2004 11:18 AMBerners-Lee's book, Weaving the Web
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006251587X/
is quite good, for those with more interest in the history of the WWW.
Posted by: Sam Penrose on February 17, 2004 11:53 AMJim Shirk is correct-a "lab" accident. The creator accidently dosed himself and went to a cocktail party. Things became a bit weird,to say the least, as he took a massive dose. But first time around,who knows what a dose is?
Posted by: Palolo lolo on February 17, 2004 03:39 PMTrue, Palolo, and his name was Albert Hoffman.
Posted by: Chuck Nolan on February 17, 2004 03:55 PMA lab accident in Switzerland? I thought that was LSD!
Posted by: sw on February 17, 2004 04:14 PMOOps,
Great minds think alike. Or, they are all part of the same chemically induced illusion.
Posted by: SW on February 17, 2004 04:16 PMbut isn't lysergic acid derived from ergot?, Supposedly the cause of the Puritan witch trials?
Posted by: big al on February 17, 2004 06:08 PMWhoa! All of a sudden I'm having a flashback...
Wait, it's OK, it's just an HTML error asking me if I want to debug the page, I'll be allright.
Posted by: non economist on February 17, 2004 06:19 PMAagh, no, no, silly, no.
Suppose hyperlinks really did go both ways. The World Wide Web would never have worked.
Think about how you'd write a web page if you had to refer to every other web-page that referred to you.
If you're writing a book in html you can do that. But if you ever wanted to refer to someone else's book, you'd need to CHANGE THEIR BOOK. You'd need WRITE-ACCESS to their website, not just READ-ACCESS.
http and html succeeded not because they were platonic ideal of how a web should work, but because they worked well in an inconstant world where networks went down and security was an issue.
meno
Posted by: meno on February 17, 2004 08:45 PMThere's a first-person account by Hoffman of the first LSD trip. He wrote it up in a serious, plodding way, which gives the effect of dead-pan humor, knowing what we do now. He realized quickly that he wasn't going to get any work done and should go home. The bike ride was usually a few minutes, but seemed to take hours. The accident wasn't in the synthesis, which was correct, but his accidental ingestion of a few micrograms.
Posted by: Roger Bigod on February 18, 2004 08:20 AMFirstly, Tim had this vision of information retrieval that would work across the disparate groups at CERN (an ever shifting conglomerate of scientists). There was some important groups to convince along the way, see for example his distinction between Unified Resource Identifiers and the eventual Uniform Resource Location.
At the moment it has expanded into a crude approximation of global file system, with security features tacked on (like user access) lacking say the ACL of AFS. The advantage was that it was simple enough to use such that it gained enough critical mass in a crucial period. So it could be interpreted as an accident (fortuitous cirucmstance exploited within a window of opportunity) rather than planned success.
As for the comment about changing links ... look up PURLS (persistent URLS) which were a level of indirection. Trackbacks are one specific implementation of this. In some ways, http was lightweight enough to handle the common cases without inccuring the overheads (and complexity) of additional functionality. One should wait and see how XML and its melange of metadata management works out. See http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html for a critique on semantic web.
great sites, well done
Posted by: jan on May 6, 2004 01:16 AMSemper paratus - Always ready (US Coast Guard Motto)
Docendo discitur - It is learned by teaching. (Seneca)