Raw

My batteries weren't included this year and I've spent most of the past week full of cold, snivelling and feeling sorry for myself. The silver lining is I've now a backlog of good-to-read stuff (I'm not going near the must-read stuff for at least another week ;-)

In How the read/write web was lost… Bob Wyman picks up on TimBL's point of information on the first browser being an editor too and gives a convincing explanation for how the writeability went away.

He identifies a general phenomena nearby :

Typically, those who first work on an idea or concept will see that it has a very wide scope of application, however, they are almost always forced to focus on one or another specific, limited scopes in order to present their idea in a relevant fashion to potential adopters who have specific issues addressed by the innovation. Often, in the process of this focused positioning to convince early-adopters to accept an idea or process, much of the full richness of the vision is lost or put aside. The cost of acceptance is thus often the loss of very important, even essential, elements of the vision. Sometimes, the loss is permanent and only the original thinker knows what paths were not traveled…

There's some history of Bob's own (dark horse!), with hypertext on VAX, including some deployment at CERN, of all places. He finishes on a positive note, framing blogs, Wikis etc as the rediscovery of the lost writeability.

[Danny]