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Clones
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 2538
Posted by sub
2005-01-13 05:09:29
Historically speaking, first came hypertext and hyperlinks which transformed a linear/2D “book” into a random-access/3D textual repository. The WWW paradigm expands this to encompass almost everything anybody in the world has ever put into digital form. (By the way, anybody read “Mapping Hypertext” by Robert Horn, or followed his methodology of Information Mapping?)
The clones paradigm is similar to “mirrors” in the web: local synchronised copies of information kept elsewhere.
In the case of outliners, clones are a sort of oxymoron. When we represent a concept or information structure as a hierarchical model, clones are those items that refuse to fit into our model!
I personally find internal hyperlinks a more consistent way of working as it doesn’t interfere with the conceptual structure, only with the navigation.
On the other hand, I also find Brainstorms’s Namesake/clone concept brilliant “You could visualise a BrainStorm model hierarchy as a Christmas tree with the namesakes being represented by tinsel or fairy lights connecting different branches together.”
In fact, though Brainstorm is hierarchical and won’t allow, for example, recursive namesaking, it probably represents the most consistent and versatile 3D textual repository I’ve personally used.
alx