I just thought of something. What if the payload of Ted Nelson’s ZigZag structures was not just hard media data, but also live objects, like events?
Weblogs, for all their coolness, are still linear orderings of little narratives. And that narrative structure, unless carefully tended, can tend to become disjointed. Categories might help, but really, how much can they do? Chronological ordering does not necessarily guarantee a narrative ordering, an ordering that makes sense. Though the mind can make sense of it if it wants to.
Wikis go in another direction entirely. The writer (or writers) creates a document, links it to a new document which is then created. As he goes through this document, he links back and forth, creating a massively hyperlinked structure. In the process, he is generating a stream of RecentChanges.
But even this, Ted Nelson would say, would be limiting the form. We’re still thinking about one-way links, for one. Another, attributions get lost.
But it’s closer to what he wants to say. And it shows that massively hyperlinked documents have a sort of marshalled aspect to them; they are not massively hyperlinked at the beginning; they are made one element at a time, one edit at a time. So what am I saying?
Let’s say though you have a weblog. That can be construed as a series of words or sentences. And any series of words or sentences given the proper data structure support behind it, can be transcluded according to Nelson’s old Xanadu model.
So you have a stream of words ordered chronologically. Call this the chronological dimension in ZigZag space. This is no different from a text editor, huh? You type words one at a time, and that’s how the editor displays them. You save the document. If we think in terms of the ZigZag model, the document is now a rank (as in rank ordering).
Now let’s say you want to edit that work. You impose a different ordering principle, add words, switch them around, cut and paste, but you still do that one event at a time. This stream of events, if it is captured completely and properly, produces another rank. Any stream can be represented as a rank. (This set of operations on a base text might be thought of as a set of transclusions of the base document into a new document, I think.) But this rank of operations (cuts, pastes, addenda, deletions, transclusions) is done along a new dimension, say, the firstEdit dimension of ZigZag space.
If we twist our mind’s eye 180 degrees into some imaginary dimension where we could see all these objects, we might see that the original ZigZag.chronological rank looks like an OrderedCollection of words, and weaving in and out of that line of words are the events or operations that created our first new edition of that work.
Let’s give our perspective another whack along another dimension, so that when it alights it sees the first new edition as a text entire. We see the text along a new dimension, the ZigZag.firstEdition dimension. Weaving in and out of it along the firstEdit dimension are the operations that brought it into being.
So if there were some tool that could implement ZigZag properly, and allow the individual nodes within the ranks and columns to specify not only elements of our postings, but operations on those postings, and then allow a reader to realign along those dimensions and then onto story dimensions, ZigZagged weblogs suddenly become much more useful to what I have in mind.
Of course this is all dreamer talk, and not doer talk. Having finished my taxes scant hours ago, I am in no mood to go chasing this any further than speculatively. Plus I may have misunderstood Nelson entirely.
10:12:29 PM 
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