Almost there: a new medium on the Web

In his famous article, Vannevar Bush (1945) envisioned memex (memory extension), a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. Memex stores, links, and retrieves annotated text, photographs, speech, video, and film recordings. One of its important functions is that it allows annotation and retrieval, or selection of multimodal information on the basis of semantic content. According to Bush, to facilitate content retrieval, there is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find a delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. At the beginning of the article, he predicted that the interface to memex would use speech recognition and understanding. By the end, he envisioned an interface that could detect the electric waveforms from our brain to record thoughts and dreams and transform them into retrievable memex documents. In my opinion, the Web will eventually evolve into a truly dynamic multimodal medium without its current bias for static presentations. This medium will be different from and coexist with print, radio, cinema, television, cable, and video rentals. One of the features of memex that will materialize on the Web is the availability of audio and video media that can be linked and retrieved in much the same way as hypertext is