Thanks for those links, especially the first to Jamie Zawinski's 1998 post on "vast volumes of email" and interwingled data. Yes, that is the sort of concepts and implementation I am talking about (and had hoped perhaps to move Thunderbird towards). Though I might prefer a different UI than JetBrain's Omea -- as well as a FOSS one. In one sketch of some ideas, I was thinking of that all more as a set of plugins: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip2

Jamie is obviously a brilliant and humane guy -- and his Lisp roots really show in his design of general purpose systems. Looking at Jamie's website, I was hanging around the CMU Robotics Labs around 1986 when he was too so I wonder if we may have ever talked in passing then?

LISP as a programming mindset encourages such generalized designs about information handling, transformation, and linking -- as does inspirations from early AI research (thinking about thinking). For example there is the book Representation and Meaning by Herbert Simon and Laurent Siklossy from 1972 -- as one of many early AI books. I have that one because Professor Simon was nice enough to give me a copy back then during a few conversations we had in his office. Before that, in high school circa 1980 I did an independent study project using Patrick Winston's book on AI. William Kent's 1978 book "Data and Reality" (the first edition -- the third edition was dumbed down by someone else) is another great inspiration. There is a sort of cross over between AI-inspired design and human-centric "augmenting" design.

An interesting comment on the AI/IA crossover by Brad Neuberg (who worked on Open HyperScope):
http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/ia_vs__ai.html
"I‘ve traditionally been in the IA camp my whole career; I’ve spent the last year going deep into the AI camp. Traditionally these have been opposite worlds but I’m wondering if there might be some powerful, interesting ways to combine them together. One is humanistic and and design focused, the other tends to be more analytical; the space between them is where I’m interested in exploring in the future."

Back around 1988 I applied to be in the NeXT developer program with a concept for an application (embarrassingly called "Orgi" back then, but I was young and reckless/foolish) where the idea was that any data item could hook up with any other data item (using triples). That application never got acted on until I met Steve Jobs when he gave a talk at Princeton and asked him personally about the developer program. And such ideas came out of my earlier interest in triplestores --
ideas that contributed to the roots of WordNet by my undergraduate advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller started just as I was graduating.

In any case, as I said, "I've been beating my head against that wall for years with very limited progress (as have others)". :-)

Jamie was obviously smart enough to connect with such ideas and move on to a happier life selling beer, pizza, and conversational ambiance. Obviously a much smarter guy than I am. :-) And I did not realize his early interest before, so thanks. I knew of another person who became much happier leaving contentious academia after his PhD and being a professor to run a hardware store. See also Matthew B. Crawford's "The Case for Working with Your Hands" written by someone with a PhD who left the non-profit public policy sector to do motorcycle repair: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html

That said, maybe if Jamie had run Mozilla we would not have seen such a tragic waste of billions of non-profit dollars mostly pissed away -- including by mostly abandoning Thunderbird? Or, maybe his voice would have just been ignored? Hard to day. Innovation is such a complex thing. Some ideas I've collected for supporting innovation at such places: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

Doug Engelbart and many people he inspired are others near the root of this "intertwingled" data ideas (including "Open HyperScope" as a successor to "Augment" http://hyperscope.org/ ). Ted Nelson and people he inspired with Xanadu. Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls with Smalltalk and its implications as a thinking tool (Dan ran a family hotel for years afterwards). Ward Cunningham with the Wiki server idea and now the Smallest Federated Wiki idea. Mitch Kapor and the Chandler Project. The recent Dat Project by Max Ogden and others also connects with all this somewhat. There is this great book called "Design and Memory" from 1980 by Peter Huyck and Nellie Kremenak exploring such ideas. And of course "As We may Think" by Vannevar Bush. But the roots go further back though annotated scrolls (and the Talmud) and millennia of libraries -- and even back to the first "Standing Bear" cave paintings (see the book, "The Walking People").

This issue of (re)creating a decentralized alternative based around an email-ish feeling of interlinked locally-searchable information is increasingly important because it potentially is a way to move beyond negative aspects of centralized (anti-)social media.

But, hey, my wife and I have more than 5000 books in our house, so all this might just be my hoarding tendencies trying to justify themselves? :-)

Well, off to an unrelated job. And it is unrelated precisely because most of the big paying players in this space (e.g. Google and Facebook) want to get between people and their data -- and typical startups make deals with investors which limit their ability to do FOSS. Still, I can hope there will eventually be, say, an "Automattic" of this "intertwingling" equivalent of WordPress. I actually had hoped Automattic might itself become such a company, but they sadly seem to now see themselves just as a Wix/Squarespace competitor (e.g. adopting Slack for internal communications -- and not even Mattermost or Matrix.org if they want to let someone else own that space and cooperate with another FOSS system).

At least it is nice to think about these things in my spare time -- although sadly at the cost of other experiences. Maybe it is all just a mistake to use my non-job time like that, like Piotr Solnica suggests: https://twitter.com/_solnic_/status/953578620617920513