What is The Memex? Xerox Presents Trailmeme. Last week Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a guest article for the Wall St Journal, discussing the need for new forms of newspaper publishing to replace the old print paradigm. Another not-so-new paradigm, but one more suited to the networked computer age we live in today, is Vannevar Bush‘s 1945 pre-hypertext concept the Memex. Trailmeme is a product by Xerox that models itself on The Memex. It’s a destination site for Xerox Trails, which is being promoted as “a new kind of Web-based publishing technology.” We last saw a product attempting a Memex-like service over 3 years ago, when we reviewed Trailfire in 2006. Trailmeme enables users to map a set of web pages or other digital objects. Trailmeme includes a “collaboratively filtered” destination site, a bookmarklet and a toolbar for consumers, and a set of plug-ins compatible with WordPress and Media Wiki. Xerox has created Trailmeme in the hope that it will be one solution to the decline of paper use and print publishing.
Trailmeme for WordPress. A New Kind of Web Publishing – Trailmeme Launches at DEMO Fall 2010. Yahoo is part of the Yahoo family of brands The sites and apps that we own and operate, including Yahoo, AOL, Engadget, In The Know and Makers.Yahoo family of brands. When you use our sites and apps, we use Cookies Cookies (including similar technologies such as web storage) allow the operators of websites and apps to store and read information from your device. Learn more in our cookie policy.cookies to: provide our sites and apps to you authenticate users, apply security measures, and prevent spam and abuse, and MeasurementWe count the number of visitors to our pages, the type of device they use (iOS or Android), the browser they use and the duration of their visit to our websites and apps.
This data is collected in aggregate and is not tied to specific users.measure your use of our sites and apps If you do not want us and our partners to use cookies and personal data for these additional purposes, click 'Reject all'. DEMO: Trailmeme lets you take a walk on the Internet. The next step in sorting through and sharing content may involve a little bit of trailblazing, if Xerox-backed startup Trailmeme has its way when it launches at DEMO Fall 2010. Trailmeme allows users to connect links in a logical order on a “trail” that users can follow with what it calls a content-discovery tool. Any user can build a trail, and the popularity of a trail is dependent on how many times someone has actually “walked” it.
Links are presented in the form of a web for users to click to visit each individual link. The company hopes to eliminate anxiety over information overload by having users view trails linked in a logical order — something that reads more like a newspaper or a book than a Twitter feed. The whole system is built with Ruby on Rails, a popular Web-application development environment, and HTML5, the latest version of the common Web-page standard, which means users of older Internet Explorer Web browsers may have some trouble using it.