I’ve known about the Berners-Lee Poster Session for a while, but in case you all don’t, here’s the skinny: as late as December 1991 belief in Tim-Berners Lee’s World Wide Web idea was low enough that a paper he submitted on the subject to the Hypermedia ’91 conference in San Antonio, TX was bumped down to a poster session.

Today, though, things got a bit more awesome. While looking for an Internet Archive video to test Blackboard embedding on (this is my life now, folks) I came across this AMAZING video, which has only 47 views.

In it Mark Frisse, the man who rejected Berners-Lee’s paper on the World Wide Web from the conference, explains why he rejected it, and apologizes to Tim Berners-Lee for the snub. He just couldn’t see that in practice people who hit a broken link would just back up and find another. It just seemed broken to him, a “spaghetti bowl of gotos”.

The background music is mixed a bit loud. But it is worth sitting through every minute.

Where this might lead you, if you are so inclined, is to Amy Collier’s excellent posts on Not-Yetness, which talk about how we get so hung up on eliminating messiness that we miss the generative power of new approaches.

I will also probably link to this page when people ask me “But how will you know you have the best/latest/fullest version of a page in fedwiki?” Because the answer is the same answer that Frisse couldn’t see: ninety-nine percent of the time you won’t care. You really won’t. From the perspective of the system, it’s a mess. From the perspective of the user you just need an article that’s good enough, and a system that gives you seven of those to choose from is better than one that gives you none.