What goes around comes around

A tribute to one of Silicon Valley's most influential and forgotten researchers at Xerox PARC event From SiliconValleyWatcher.com by Tom Foremski. Tom has started a series on one the the valley's early icons: Doug Engelbart. You might know him as the inventor of the mouse. How about Moore's law, and timesharing in which many users can share one computer? Paradoxically, it was timesharing that sparked the pc revolution.

Tom continues, "...we talk a lot on SVW about blogging, wikis and RSS, the media technologies defining this phase 2.0 of the internet. In 1965, Engelbart told me, "we had developed a way of sending email, and making any word of a document into a permalink, which could be linked to any other document or word and easily published to others. Essentially we had blogs and wikis.""

It's fascinating to find out what might have derailed these early technologies and how we are moving back to them with Web 2.0.

Dan Gillmor has a post on The Valley's heritage that mentions PARC's history in the valley.

Bonus - Accidental Magic? Dr. Engelbart talks about collective IQ. Would that be group blogs and KM? The Bootstrap Institute was conceived by Dr. Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting individual and organizational ability to better address problems that are complex and urgent. Compare his work with Howard Rheingold's, author of Smart Mobs, that I touched on in May I Have Your Attention?