HT03: The Next Big Thing
An interesting aspect of the proposals for The Next Big Thing -- a highlight panel at Hypertext '03 -- was that the next big things weren't too big.
The next big thing: Ted Nelson, Cathy Marshall, Peter Nürnberg, Paul De Bra.
If this panel had been held a few years ago, I think people would have plotted revolts against the Web and the overthrow of the military-infotainment complex. These proposals were ambitious, but also small enough in scale that you kept telling yourself that this could work. I liked Marshall's Time Machine, for preserving and organizing all your journals and notebooks and such. The clear audience favorite, though, was Rust's proposal to build an open database of research data to liberate science from the publishers.