(2022-08-04) Marks The Quest For A Memex

Kevin Marks: The Quest for a Memex. This week John Borthwick put out a call for Tools for Thinking:

One of the oldest ideas for a hypertext machine is the Memex

But what he was really wanting was a kind of Zettelkasten.

And once he had this, he wanted to make links, which he called trails (think tagging multiple items):

This made me think about making a new view of a post, where the inbound and outbound links are shown in the margins of the page, and the flow is more dynamic

The inbound links can be found with Webmention, which is already here, but scanning the outbound links and making previews for them is a separate task. It seems related though - if a webmention tool can provide a prevew for inbound lnks, why not for outbound ones too?

This page is a mock-up.

Chris Aldrich: Thoughts on Kevin Marks' The Quest for a Memex 2022-07-31

I’ll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however

Some of Kevin’s conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski’s use of The Brain.

I’m also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu’s experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website

It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark’s experiments with hovercards in the past

Next up, I’d love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites… Who will show us those “associative trails”?