The amazing thing about the Vannevar Bush's essay is that he didn't made baseless assumptions about future. He predicted thing that can be done the contemporary technologies on the scale which wasn't yet figured out in a time when everyone else was too busy expecting flying cars in future without considering their feasibility.
So I do something perhaps similar to Bush's trail idea and perhaps not. I use google bookmarks to build my own set of links for a number of given topics (tags). I've put the javascript for adding as bookmark into a bookmark item so throwing the URL to something interesting and tagging it with subject tags relevant to me is as easy as selecting a menu item. To date I have over 1359 tags. For a given tag, say MPLS, overlay transport, civil war, central african precolonial women's rights, or hubble pics, I end up with a list of links to documents about that topic interesting to me. For the most part I keep the tags narrowly focused and nearly always have multiple tags per link. So the tags roughly correlate to trails, although obviously not completely. But, as I understand Bush's thinking on it, kind of.
W3C 2104 Web Annotations Workshop report, with slides and video, http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/report.html
I find Rap Genius implementation of this quite good. For example http://genius.com/1500995/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret/O...
Medium has annotations too, and IIRC newer versions of IE have this functionality built-in so that it works for any site.
That said, as the OP points out, web pages (and your annotations with them) change or disappear all the time, so if you need to keep something as a reference in your "memex", you may want to scrape it (Evernote etc).
>There is no class of trail blazers.
I think this post takes a narrow view of what constitutes a trail and link. From listicles, Pinterest boards, and even your Facebook feed, people use the internet to connect to different links and articles. This process of curation occurs at personal (Pinterest) and at large (Wikipedia).
There are, indeed, people who make a living from annotating and associating articles and information (see the HN front page and brainpickings).
The author quotes: “Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his work, by whatever twisted interpretation. I for one carry on his work by keeping the links outside the file, as he did.” – Ted Nelson, eulogizing Doug Engelbart.
This is a hint. People interested in this topic should study the work of Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu. Ted's visionary ideas permeate our thinking today.
I think the Bush essay is totally fascinating. I have never seen it before and it's amazing to think it was written such a long time ago. However, both it and the Federated Wiki both miss an important part of the how textual information is created and linked on the web, by talking about "articles". In the essay the user reads through articles and links between articles, while in wiki systems the contributors' goal is usually to build an article. IMHO the focus on creating articles is the cause of a great many problems on wiki systems, and it also influences the discussion of linking.
Taking Wikipedia as an example, readers build up an article piece by piece to create a long text article. However, much of the information inside the article can be better represented as data. Articles are rigid, and the text inside them cannot be manipulated easily. For example, instead of a long article, a biography can be represented as a timeline of events. That timeline of events (as data) can then be manipulated (filtered and sorted) by the end user to give whatever view they want. It's not just a matter of following a trail (as the Bush text says), but of collecting the information as you go.
Instead of acting as a database of facts or events, Wikipedia acts like a book (a paper encyclopedia). Sure it has interlinked pages, but that's where it stops. Because it acts like a book it seems acceptable to have its external links represented as footnotes in a reference section under the main text. Federated wiki runs into the same problem too because it's focus is also on articles -- the result of collaboration is a page that cannot act as data.
But the web is not a book and both articles and footnotes (and lack of other multimedia features) are not native to the way it functions. I think there are many better solutions to this problem than going back to footnotes. The medium is the message and solutions need to stop trying to make the web work like a book, but to make it work for the web.
I have been working on much of the above on my site. I got round the footnotes issue by placing the source link on the verbs in the text, while internal linking is handled by nouns. http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-broken-links/
It's interesting to see some of the contemporary systems of the World Wide Web. Does anyone know of a good article exploring why the Web won and the other systems all faded away?
By the way, feel free to annotate the above article with Hypothes.is: https://via.hypothes.is/http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-...
I think the article is too eager to dismiss hotspot-style links, valid as its point about multiple connections may be. The solution I'd prefer would be something like Medium-style inline comments, where the immediate "hotspot" is a number representing a collection of responses, and the links occur inside of those.
There are some people working on this on the science/annotation side [1]. I know there were good reasons why TBL didn't go with bidirectional links, but we are still paying for it to this day.
This thoughtful article deserves more interesting discussion than I fear its generic title will obtain for it, so we've changed the title to a (compressed) representative sentence. Happy to change it again if anyone suggests something better.
I recall some efforts to make a social browser, where people visiting a web page could leave comments on it and read comments from others.
IIRC (and I fear I don't RC), the web industry hated this idea because they couldn't control and monetize the conversation around their content. Of course, we now do this exact thing with sites like Slash Dot, Digg, and Hacker News, only there is this step of going to the social site to see the popular links.
If you go to a page and wonder what HN has to say about it, you have to do a search for the URL by yourself. (Perhaps there is a browser add-on that does this?)
Taking comments to a place where you could annotate the document and not just discuss the page as a whole is the next step for sites like HN. Of course, there is the pesky problem of the sites hating this and using every legal tool in their arsenal to prevent you from presenting this as an interface.