Blogging the plaNetwork conference in San Francisco.

Q & A now.

Marc Canter asks about different types of users needing different types of interfaces. Doug talks about learning different interfaces. Need to push the capability, but appreciate how hard things are to learn. Uses example of bicycle. Going from just riding to tricks is a big leap in capability. We would all be riding tricycles if people only stuck to what is easy.

He is intrigued by what our perceptual machinery can do. What kinds of other things can you learn to do that become natural, but you don't start out with. The computer can give us all kinds of symbols that allow us to grok things like argument structures a lot quicker. It is a paradigm issue to look ahead towards this.

Q & A about using these links to serve political and social causes. Agreement that this would be good.

On more dimensional interfaces. Doug talks about links going to a video passage or highlighting an area of a frame of video. Accessing digital images of book pages.

FYI, here is a link to Open Hyperdocument System.

An audience member is asking Doug to show us another 40 years of evolution. Doug says it is really the same, pretty much. Just that people haven't got it yet. Talking about AI stuff that was thought would replace the need for advanced human interfaces. Doug working in the other direction towards these augmentation systems.

Talking about systems that track verbs and nouns in people's vocabularies. Could have secretaries doing word processing in an hour (this is in the 1970s). As soon as people found out they had small vocabularies, they would want to improve them rather than rely on the tool!

Question about signal to noise ratio is information. Doug is still mad at the AI guys, so he is not depending on them to filter stuff for you. Talking about cooperating to build knowledge structures and using them. He wants to build one that explains how to build them (he uses the acronym DKR, not sure what that stands for exactly).

Presentation ending. Standing ovation. Going to show the images of earth next.

Looks like this is a wrap for the night. Be back tomorrow: same bat time, same bat channel.