Alex has written a fascinating article for Boxes&Arrows about a possible forefather of the web who predates Vannevar Bush:

“With the faceted philosophy of the UDC as backdrop, the Traité posited a universal “law of organization” declaring that no document could be properly understood by itself, but that its meaning becomes clarified through its influence on other documents, and vice versa. “[A]ll bibliological creation,” he said, “no matter how original and how powerful, implies redistribution, combination and new amalgamations.”

While that sentiment may sound postmodernist in spirit, Otlet was no semiotician; rather, he simply believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional, with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, other readers, writers and topics. Otlet believed in the possibility of empirical truth, or what he called “facticity”—a property that emerged over time, through the ongoing collaboration between readers and writers. In Otlet’s world, each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document.

Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson would later voice strikingly similar ideas about the notion of associative “trails” between documents. Distinguishing Otlet’s vision from the Bush-Nelson (and Berners-Lee) model is the conviction—long since fallen out of favor—in the possibility of a universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable social forces of scholarship.

Otlet’s vision suggests an intellectual cosmos illuminated both by objective classification and by the direct influence of readers and writers: a system simultaneously ordered and self-organizing, and endlessly re-configurable by the individual reader or writer.”

In other news from the ’eminence-grise’ desk, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are visiting London and heading for the RIBA for an event called: “Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn Meet the BBC”.

An apt venue, as all these Net-forefathers (Otlet included) look like The Architect.

» Boxes and Arrows: Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet

Please forgive slow response to email at the moment, I am on dialup in southern Lapland. Two days of intense, day long meetings are over, and now it’s time to fling myself down slippery snowcovered hills sides. Cross-country skiing has already been attempted with varying results, and tomorrow is snowboard, possibly; so this weekend I will be mainly falling on my arse.

Oww.

Quote of the day, by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips:

“If there’s no God, there must be a lot of science. But if it’s just science, there’s no gloriousness out there. It seems like one defeats the other, and I like both.”

A close second:

“Natura in reticulum sua genera connexit, non in catenam; homines non possunt nisi catenam sequi, cum non plura simul possint sermone exponere.” – Albrecht von Haller

See AKMA for the translation…

[by Chris, via Foe]

Kinda. Spaceweatherphone.com gives you aurora alerts to your phone. It’s cloudy in Helsinki, so none of the hoped-for displays as yet.

Next stop Helsinki.

• iCan-ography from Tom Coates, Louise Ferguson, Blogosphere.us, and Nathan ‘gone too long’ Jones.
• Joey’s notes from a Neal Stephenson Q&A where none of his personal tech <a href=”http://www.blackbeltjones.com/work/mt/archives/000728.html”blew up.
• Foe on identity theft and remembrance of things past in the age of Amazon.
• Chris on how maps work</a

Enjoying free wifi and good coffee at the moment in Tinderbox, Upper St, N1 [free until 1st November] and Foyles cafe on Charing Cross Road. Discovered Foyle’s hotspot while struggling to get connected in the souless surrounds of the Starbucks concession in Borders on Charing Cross Road.

Stood next to a window where the connection seemed to be there, if very poor – holding my laptop in one hand and trying to IM with one finger. Then, while cursing, opened a browser- and saw the splash-sponsorship screen for the hotspot bore the logos of Foyles and O’Reilly…

The cloud of connectivity was drifting across the road – not where I’d imagined it had orginated from at all! I shut down and moved across the road, where there was organic food, fine coffee, beer and nice tunes from Ray’s Jazz store that share the space with the cafe on the first floor of Foyles.

A lovely discovery to make, if it wasn’t my final week in London…

iCan is live (in beta-be-gentle-with-it-form). It’s been a tough 14 months, but hopefully it will be of real use to people with real problems or plans for their locality.

It’s a little empty right now, as the punters have yet to populate it, but it’s going to grow and get better. We had the design work for perhaps the next couple of revisions already done before I left, and the ethnographic research we did at the top of the project, coupled with user-testing and research that the new design lead Helen Day is going to be doing should see some rapid iterations up-ahead.

It remains to say well done to all who made it possible. Helen, Julie, Priya, Ki, Andy, Thomas, Dharmesh, Stokes, Nico, James, Anno and Tom particularly. Danny has a nice little appraisal.

Half-formed thought [© Philip Tabor]: If I’m anything to go by as an example, then I would think that a lot of people who download episodes of their favourite TV shows using p2p networks then go on to buy DVD or VHS box-sets of those same shows when they are released a year-or-so later.

Often, due to demand from fanbases, these box-sets have place-holder pages on Amazon where it’s possible to pre-order them.

Why not legitimise p2p downloads though this pre-order method? Buy the box-set upfront, a bit of Amazon web-services magic dust, have the bits now, get the atoms later.

Does this seem fair? A good idea? How would this work?

the )( symbol gets a new lease of life at the Microsoft PDC Event. All that stuff seems so long ago. It was last year. Wierd. Anyway – if anyone involved is reading this and feels like posting me a copy, I’d be grateful!