Seth Roberts tells us, with some excerpts from my email with him. Julio Cortazar is important because he tried to write a novel — Hopscotch — that could be read in either of two sequences, or more. Similarly, a blog should make sense whether read from start to finish, every day, or finish to start. That imposes both constraints and opportunities…
That’s an easy one.
Blogs came out of .plan files and a convergence of web technologies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
John Carmack, as a more famous example, started using .plan as a way of keeping people up-to-date on his latest work way back in 1997.
http://doom-ed.com/blog/1997/03/
blogs never really give the sense of a singular experience like Hopscotch does — as though, by sheer chance you happened to read this after that. But that’s the nature of the narrative
Interestingly hypertext novels (ie Shelley Jackson’s The Patchwork Girl) fell out of vogue just as blogs took off, and since then no one — that I have heard of — has attempted blogging a novel (or fiction literature of the Hopscotch kind.) One could also compare hypertext lit to videogames, which also provide a singular experience for the user alone
hunter thompson. gonzo journalism
Coincidentially (to my knowledge, at least), Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext” in 1963, the same year that Hopscotch appeared.
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