Memex is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed (2020)

You can annotate any upload (arbitrary data, files, or collections of files) with tags and since the data is permanent, your links don't break.

Publication is possible too, and with the Universal Data License, copyright holders can define the terms for their part of the publication right at upload time.

There was a Microsoft Research project in the early 00’s called “Stuff I’ve Seen” that did basically this. I don’t know why it never really went anywhere - I’ve wanted one ever since I saw the talk.

Edit: Link - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/stuff-i...

It's weird — we, the builders of HTTP-based APIs, very well understand the concept of "REpresentational State Transfer" ...but I've never seen a web-app server that actually accepts PUT or PATCH or POST of HTML Content-Type against the baked-out server-rendered HTML views, such that if you were to push a modified version of said representational state (the post-edit HTML), it would get "decompiled" on the backend into a delta of the internal state (e.g. Markdown in a CMS), and that change to the internal state would get persisted, reflecting back as a change in the representational state when the page is fetched.

If anyone would just actually implement that on a web-app backend, then you'd be able to "annotate, edit, and extend" HTML-presented content using freakin' NSCA Mosaic from 1993. Or the "edit in Frontpage" feature of IE4.

(No modern equivalents, though — the features that would generate a "native" browser PUT or PATCH against an HTML page have since shrivelled up and died, after it became clear that no server would ever bother to allow them.)

To dodge the chicken-and-egg problem of browser support, you could do this today, with a Javscript SPA serving the browser role: the frontend app would ensure that it's reflecting all internal state changes in its in-memory client-side internal state into changes to the HTML (even if those changes don't cause any presentation changes on the client side); and then, where a regular SPA would push those changes by calling an API endpoint that accepts a version of its in-memory client-side internal state, this SPA would just push the updated HTML, as a PUT or PATCH to the very same URL that was loaded to deliver the SPA.

I think what the world has needed basically since then is browser integration for something like annotations, so that web sites and commentary about them can live together. And with less of a direct line to advertising dollars. Perhaps something that could live in the Fediverse. Sometimes I want HN’s opinion and sometimes I want someone else’s.

Using a more general architecture, it was possible to add many kinds of structures on top of existing Web pages collaboratively. Navigational or spatial hypermedia, guided tours, etc. Link bases were stored outside of the linked resources, so that you could have different sets of structures applied to a corpus of documents.

There were also quite a few commercial attempts in this space. However, all, commercial and research alike, ultimately failed, and I believe that there were several reasons behind this: Web site owners disliked that others could annotate their pages; shared link bases often became polluted; bookmarks were ‘good enough’ for most users; maintaining link anchor consistency in (increasingly dynamic) Web pages became more and more difficult (despite our best efforts); and while I remain enthused about the notion of the MEMEX scholar carefully annotating their corpus of literature, I don’t think the appeal is all that widespread.

Still, there are remnants in some systems – e.g., I enjoy to see that others have highlighted the same passage as I in a Kindle book.

There have been "big programs" but when the web came, fundamental hypertext research and development on other systems came to a grinding halt. Ted Nelson, and many other researchers, predicted many of the problems that we now face with the Web, notably broken links, copyright and payment as well as usability/user interface issues.

I don't know what an average user is, but what a user typically does or wants to do with a computer is somewhat (pre)determined by its design. Computer systems have, for better or worse, strong influence on what we consider as practical, what we think we need and even what we consider as possible. (Programming languages have a similar effect).

One of the key points of Ted Nelson's research is that much of the writing process is re-arranging, or recombining, individual pieces (text, images, ...) into a bigger whole. In some sense, hypertext provides support for fine-grained modularized writing. It provides mechanisms and structures for combination and recombination. But this requires a "common" hypertext structure that can be easily and conveniently viewed, manipulated and "shared" between applications. Because this form of editing is so fundamental, it should be part of an operating system and an easily accessible "affordance".

The Web is not designed for fine-grained editing and rearranging/recombining content and has started as a compromise to get work done at CERN. For example, following a link is very easy and almost instantaneous, but creating a link is a whole different story, let alone making a collection of related web pages tied to specific inquiries, or, even making a shorter version of a page with some details left out or augmented. Hypertext goes far deeper than this.

Although a bit dated, I recommend reading Ted Nelson's seminal ACM publication in which he touches many issues concerning writing, how we can manage different versions and combinations of a text body (or a series of documents), what the problems are and how they can be technically addressed.

[1] "Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate" https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800197.806036

What do you have available to you after a hard drive failure? That's the point (or at least one of them) of having stuff in the cloud.

How do you balance the two? Local, personal storage backed up in the cloud?

To me, the biggest problem of this kind of tool is that if you use it to its fullest potential, it necessarily becomes a crucial part of your daily life, something that will cause very serious problems if you lose it.

And that means anything proprietary or closed SaaS is an absolute no go. My Mind's promise to respect privacy and stay independent of outside influence is nice, but worthless. They can change their mind at any time - or get bought up, or go bankrupt. Being a paid service might reduce the likelihood, but does not eliminate it, especially not over a timespan of decades.

So at an absolute minimum, such a tool needs to be able and willing to export all of my data in an easily processible format. This is far more important than shiny features.

My current solution is a self hosted TiddlyWiki. It may not have all the shiny features, but it is mine, and always will be, even 50 years from now. The worst case scenario is that it stops working on new browsers and nobody maintains it anymore - but I still have the data. Easily processible text files are actually its internal storage format.

I do think spatial organization can help for human consumption of not easily orderable datasets >1000 items, but I think that's a niche case for everything ive interacted with so far.

In my humble opinion these tools aren't quite there yet, which is not to say they aren't polished, but that they don't disappear from view like good tools should.

There's still a noticeable impedance mismatch due to having to use their editor, for example, which has its quirks and is different enough to a standard text editor to cause a context switch.

But it's open source and it's pretty good.

I was using Typora for a while, before Obsidian got better. It was just a tree of Markdown files and a _really_ nice Notion-like editor.

I had to write https://github.com/Cobertos/notion_export_enhancer to get my data out of notion in an actual nice tree-like structure.

I tried Obsidian again recently and their editor caught up to Typora's (and it was faster than the last time I used it). I'm trying to switch to it now, as the tree is more "file-y" than Typora (which removes blind spots for me, as I save PDFs and other stuff in my note tree).

I've resorted to writing my own though now. Notion, Typora, and Obsidian are great for one specific type of management (documents, markdown-like), but I think there's a higher level abstractions here.

I’m personally at a stage of disillusionment with the modern web such that I think returning to the early ideas without improvement is an improvement over the status quo.

It may be true that what the author describes is rudimentary, but to me, that’s kind of the point.

This isn’t to say that better tools aren’t needed. But I’m fully on board with what I see as a movement/mindset shift back to the fundamentals of the early web.

If memex becomes a concept of interest in the 2020s, perhaps interested people will invest in building better tools.

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I somewhat disagree. A memex is effectively the plain old notebook/wiki, with the potential capability raised to the second or third power.

Does a personal diary, calendar, home budget, or a small library help you get into places of power? For average people, no. But it does make organising life, and figuring out where you are, and charting how to get to where you want to be, much easier than it would be for your peers without such tools.

So yes, it gives you an edge. Whether that edge has anything to do with power is a completely orthogonal concern.