I think the extent to which this changes publishing is pretty minimal, and the substance of the book is not really my area, but the project is interesting to me because there are many instances where what you want is commentary on a fixed text – e.g. classic works, journal articles, where a wiki wouldn’t make sense. You’re not a co-author, you’re a commentator. For this GAM3R 7H30RY project they came up with their own interface to do this. As far as I know there isn’t a standard setup for textual commentary / criticism.

The way they have it set up is decent, but seems like it would be very difficult to set up. What I’d like to see is a design where you can upload either a PDF or plain text as the “original” and have blog style comments on the side – referencing a particular point in the text and displayed as close as possible to that portion of the text. There is also a possible need for a wiki instead of comments. Another option would be inserting the comment like comments in word processing applications – it pops up when you roll over the little triangle.

I think this would be a very useful project. Any programmers out there?

This brought my thinking up to a higher level on this subject. After all, hypertext was only a theory or highly specialized application when I was born and it has make a profound impact on the world today. There will certainly be more killer apps to come. In fact, I think I’ve seen a glimmer of it already.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been around for decades. I know some people who work in that field, generally, trained geographers who use specialized tools. One small advance toward meaningful GIS usage is Zillow.com. Their slogan is “your edge in real estate” and they really deliver with (at least in my area) extremely detailed house value information. It’s not every day that a “web 2.0″ type application comes along that not only will my mom find interesting, but extremely useful. I think that’s a very important test. A lot of ideas are not ready for prime-time and that’s fine, but it’s interesting to find one that is.