---
title: "You want disruptive? Here’s disruptive…"
date: 2005-10-25
author: "Richard MacManus"
categories:
  - name: "ReadWriteWeb"
    url: "/category/readwriteweb.md"
tags:
  - name: "2005"
    url: "/tag/2005.md"
---

# You want disruptive? Here’s disruptive…

In [today’s ZDNet column](https://web.archive.org/web/20060315001444/http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=38), I review Internet TV start-up Brightcove:

> “Brightcove was presented at the Web 2.0 Conference and is what I would class as a disruptive Web 2.0 start-up – one to keep an eye on. Whether or not they meet their ambitious aim of becoming a Google-scale Internet TV business, will play out over time. One thing’s for sure, watching their progress will be as entertaining as the many videos uploaded onto their platform.” \[[Full story at ZDNet](https://web.archive.org/web/20060315001444/http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=38)\]

Also today I came across the latest project of a man who wants to tear down Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and replace it with his own vision. It used to be known as Xanadu, but has since morphed into [Transliterature, A Humanist Design](https://web.archive.org/web/20060315001444/http://transliterature.org/). I am of course referring to [Ted Nelson](https://web.archive.org/web/20060315001444/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson), who invented the term “hypertext” in 1965 and is generally regarded as a computing pioneer.

Ted Nelson recently [wrote an essay](https://web.archive.org/web/20060315001444/http://hyperland.com/trollout.txt) about “Indirect Documents”, which got [Slashdotted](https://web.archive.org/web/20060315001444/http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/24/1054214&tid=230&tid=218) today. In the essay Nelson outlines why (in his opinion) the Xanadu project failed and he explains his new vision for Transliterature. He takes a number of potshots at Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW on the way, e.g.:

> “Why don’t I like the web? I hate its flapping and screeching and emphasis on appearance; its paper-simulation rectangles of Valuable Real Estate, artifically created by the NCSA browser, now hired out to advertisers; its hierarchies exposed and imposed; its untyped one-way links only from inside the document. (The one-way links hidden under text were a regrettable simplification of hypertext which I assented to in ’68 on the HES project. But that’s another story.) Only trivial links are possible; there is nothing to support careful annotation and study; and, of course, there is no transclusion.”

Ted Nelson is certainly an original and I’m glad he’s still around to throw spanners in the works. [I’ve written about him before](https://web.archive.org/web/20060315001444/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/001721.php) and I’m sure I will again, Web 2.0 or not.

*Originally published on ReadWriteWeb ([archived copy](https://web.archive.org/web/20020204040018/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/you_want_disrup.php))*