Doug Engelbart's  I N V I S I B L E    R E V O L U T I O N

Introduction to the HyperBlog

What can you do with a web page? You can scroll up and down, click on the links the author put there. And that's about it.

Imagine being able to click on a word and get a menu where you can choose to see the authors comments or a glossary definition. How about being able to send someone a link to specific paragraph on a web page, instead of having to tell them where on the page to look, the link takes them all the way there, to the very word or paragraph.

Imagine this and more. Imagine continually added features to allow you to modify you rviews of web pages as you see fit.

The HyperScope

These are some of the features of the HyperScope. Doug Engelbart originally came up with the idea for a HyperScope to make what has become pretty static Web pages much more dynamic & controllable by the reader, more like his famous Augment system from the sixties. Yes that's right, the HyperScope project is largely an effort to give users the flexibility they once had. For a while this deep level of control became unfashionable. It's been all about making computers-easy-to-use. So is the HyperScope hard to use? In a word, no.   :-)

Why Blog HyperScope

The HyperScope is a big deal, a big project. So we are not trying to do it all. We are doing a HyperScope for Web Logs, or Blogs. Only. It's a great place to start as it reduces the variables we have to deal with drastically.

Blogs are basically used for diary entries on the Web. They have one more important characteristic as far as we are concerned, they are technically much simpler than HTML pages, giving us a great opportunity to start on the HyperScope.

Our HyperScope for blog project is developed as a prototype so that we can learn and make mistakes, cheaply.

Blog HyperScope Benefits

The benefits are quite simply cool: Imagine blogs where you can decide who you want to read about, you decide what's on the page - you want to see the blogs of multiple authors all together in the same day? No problem We call that the MultiBlog. You even decide what paragraphs are to be shown. Which to be hidden. You don't write separate comments, you blog your comments and it's all linked like a big happy family.

This is the HyperScope Blogs on Invisible Revolution, the web-site for the Doug Engelbart Documentary. It is a small demonstration of some of the components of the full Engelbart HyperScope system, which may be featured on all the pages of the site after the initial deployment for the documentary blog.

Email2Blog Stage 1

The current blogging system on this site is the automated email to blog stage 1. The benefit of this system is that it allows blog authors to email their postings. This means that I don't have to manually code each post and add anchors and menu items etc. More importantly though, it allows people who would not have been blogging themselves to start blogging. This includes Doug and Fleur so is a big deal to this site.

The benefit for readers is that the reader get to decide who's blogs they want to read - it is possible to read several blogs simultaneously. Another initial enhancements over a simple page full of blog postings is the ability to see the blog by the first line of each post. Each blog has a permanent address (often referred to as permalink) which the reader can access by clicking and holding the mouse down on the individual post heading and choosing 'copy link'. This is because the heading is a link to itself. This link can then be emailed to people and used as a direct reference to that post.

This first version is a prototype test-bed where we get to test our assumptions about blogging and some HyperScope issues. You can read about the development of the blogging system itself in the Blog Dev Blog.

Demo Video Script showing the HyperScope (the inspiration for the Hyper Blog) in use.