Greg Lloyd on "The Return of Interactive Hypermedia, or the Triumph of Ted Nelson" at Burton Group's Catalyst Europe Conference

Greg speaks at Burton Group's Catalyst 2006 Europe Conference, Barcelona 12 Oct 2006. His topic, The Return of Interactive Hypermedia, or the Triumph of Ted Nelson is part of the Collaboration and Content track in a session: Leveraging the Services Infrastructure to Improve the User Experience.

Abstract Ted Nelson coined the term "Hypertext" about 40 years ago as a special case of what he called interactive "Hypermedia". With the rise of Web 2.0 technology (primarily user interface and web services), it's now becoming possible to deliver a better and more effective user experience to customers and employees using a web browser than with traditional application or client/server architectures. The new architecture delivers rich context in a light weight shell - versus no context and siloed data in a heavy client. I believe that people's expectations of what's possible and what should be easy are now set by what they see and use every day on the public web - from easy linking, searching and notification, to trivially simple sharing of YouTube videos and mashups. I believe that this new architecture - using browser based Ajax style UI technology that's good enough - will radically cut back-end integration time while raising the bar for effective interaction in context to a level which finally approaches Ted Nelson's vision.

Mashup's, YouTube, and Ajax style interactivity over a universe as large and diverse as the Web are tiny steps toward Ted's vision of universal aggregation and effective presentation of hypermedia (with micropayment to the creators). At least it makes the end goal of Ted's vision a more comprehensible - "Why would you want to do that?" - even to those who only understand a few billion dollars from Google.

You can get a copy of the slides here (9.2MB .ppt with screenshots).