The Garden and the Stream as Metaphors for WWW
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relat...
1 
1 The author will later call the memex the original garden.
Hyperlinks as Conversation
Hyperlinks are fine-grained, bidirectional, and extrinsic. Frequently, an argument is not with a document or chapter as a whole. It is with a particular point that someone made at a particular place in the text. For example, someone refers to the fourth law of thermodynamics, and someone else writes a criticism saying there is no fourth law of thermodynamics, linking it to the original. The fine-grained property allows the link to designate the particular piece of text with which one is takin...
notesFrom Mark S. Miller's "The Open Society and Its Media"
How Novel is the Internet?
Before the Web we were already used to sitting in front of electronic boxes for hour upon hour. The boxes have now changed, but they are still boxes. Of course the things we do on the Internet are different from those we did (and do) in front of the TV. But it’s important to remember that they are only different; they are not new. Think for a moment about what you do on the Internet. Not what you could do, but what you actually do. You email people you know. In an effort to broaden your hor... notesMarshal T. Poe makes a persuasive argument that, despite the tremendous possibilities it puts before us, we end up using the Internet to do the same old stuff we were doing before the Internet, only more conveniently.
The Difference Between the Internet and the World Wide Web
It seems that most people, even intelligent and well-informed people, are confused about the difference between the Internet and the Web. No one has expressed this misunderstanding more clearly than Tom Wolfe in Hooking Up:
I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mai... notesHillis notes that people equate the www with the internet, failing to realize they are actually very different things, with www being just one thing out of many running on the internet. He compares it to people equating electricity with electric lights, and failing to realize all the other applications the invention makes possible.
Information Retrieval is an Arms Race Between Algorithms ...
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query).
One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA authority. Anyone with an ISP account can place a page on the Web, and as is well known the Web has been the site of a proliferation of conspiracy theories, urban legends, tr... notesAs the web gets larger and data grows more complex, less trustworthy in many regards, algorithms will need to grow more sophisticated to adapt to it.
