The Past and Present of Bi-directional Links (Part Ⅰ) - 3 stories about Roam Research, starting with Project Xanadu
For me, I’ve been exploring Knowledge Management and Task Management for a long time, which is an area of interest that I’ve always been very passionate about. This series of articles is my first systematic introduction to what the bi-directional link is?
I will start by telling you the 3 stories of Roam Research, and then focus on explaining the 1 most core feature of Roam Research: bi-directional link (of course, there are many other fun things about Roam). Finally, I’ll introduce my top 2 use cases of Roam Research, as well as what Tools for Thought is and why you need a thinking tool.
- Part Ⅰ: 3 Stories about Roam Research, Starting with Project Xanadu
- Part Ⅱ: 1 Core Feature of Roam Research: [[Bi-directional Link]]
- Part Ⅲ: My Top 2 Roam Research Use Cases: Input/Output
Story 1: @Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu — The Lost “Hypertext”
The first story is actually the story of Ted Nelson, an information technology pioneer and the author of Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974), who invented the concept of “hypertext” in 1963.
However, hypertext at this time was very different from the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) we are talking about today. In Ted Nelson’s conception of a hypertext system, all the web pages or texts we visit should be linked to each other.
In 1965, Ted Nelson named his hypertextual idea “Project Xanadu” after the poem by Coleridge, because he believed that Xanadu was “a magical place where memories are never forgotten.”
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Institute for Particle Physics, proposed a new protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and defined the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), before the implementation of HTTP 1/2.
In the HTTP system, there is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI/URL) for each thing. But have you ever thought that every time we click through a link to get from page A to page B, how do we get from B back to A?
After 1991, the whole Web for now based on HTTP protocol is called World Wide Web (WWW), which is a very familiar concept today, and Tim Berners-Lee is therefore called the father of the World Wide Web.
And, on the World Wide Web, a series of large Internet companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, etc. were born, making it easy to connect and trade.
However, in a series of chain events, Tim Berners-Lee also began to accuse these companies of destroying the Web in the name of advertising and accumulating too much power by virtue of their platforms.
So Tim Berners-Lee founded the company ‘Inrupt’ and the Solid project, in an attempt to ‘reinvent the internet’ by creating a platform that would allow users to control their own data.
Meanwhile, for 84-year-old Ted Nelson, Project Xanadu was his first, personal dream until the first trial version was released in 2014. The trial version of Project Xanadu can be accessed through this Web link https://xanadu.com. To access it, you will find a cosmology article.
The left and right sides of the page are divided into different colors, and the focus is on the middle article, which actually references many other articles.
So, in Ted Nelson’s initial vision, we could be able to cross-reference the highlights from different articles, through bi-directional links while browsing the Web.
The different color highlighting actually expresses a citation relationship. Of course, in addition to the description of this citation relationship, the “Project Xanadu” will have other ideas, such as versioning or incremental publishing, etc., so I won’t go into the details of the text.
From 1963 to 2014, the first version of Project Xanadu was released, right?
But has it ever occurred to you that, the first version was also a URL web link hosted on the World Wide Web, meaning that even Ted Nelson’s original version had to be distributed through the HTTP protocol, based on the WWW, to achieve its first release?
Story 2: @Conor and Roam Research — Bi-directional Linking Notes/Thinking Tool
The second story goes to Conor White-Sullivan, the founder of Roam Research, who launched Roam Research back in 2019, kicking off the wave of bi-directional linking note-taking tools. But in fact, Roam Research is always referred to as a “networked thought tool” on Roam’s official website.
First of all, Roam is able to simulate the aforementioned “Project Xanadu” to a certain extent, where different pages can be linked to each other, meanwhile also designer Azlen from the community has implemented a visualization in Roam Research where blocks can be linked to each other, and different pages are linked to each other with paragraphs and links between paragraphs are linked by highlighting.
Then after the launch of Roam in 2019, followed by 2020 at the same time of the hottest Bi-directional Linking Note-Taking apps, especially the capital is also very frenzied, Roam Research Series A funding of $9 million, valued at more than $200 million, this latest report, showing the total funding should be $12.4 million.
Despite its small size, Roam Research has received a frenzy of capital, with more than a dozen companies and individuals participating in Roam’s Series A funding round, including Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, True Ventures, and Lux Capital, among other very well-known capitalists.
Of course, in addition to its fanatical capital, Roam also has a very fanatical community, which we usually call #roamcult, a religious-like concept. Here is a cake of the Roam Research interface made by the users themselves.
And then at the same time, there are even people who have the Roam Research logo tattooed on their bodies or legs, and I’ve seen at least five such fanatics on Twitter.
Story 3: @JimmyLv and RoamCN Community — “Exploring the Future of Work”
The third story is one of my own. I actually first learned about bi-directional links and met Roam Research in 2019, and then co-founded the RoamCN Chinese Community with two other partners (Jessie and Victor) from the blockchain area in 2020.
As I mentioned before, I’ve been interested in Knowledge Management for a long time, and the bi-directional link features provided by Roam Research are actually the answer to a long-standing puzzle I’ve been exploring.
At the same time, in the Chinese community, especially myself, I was also looking for a lot of fellow travelers to learn and explore a new tool, a very groundbreaking game-changer tool.
So, I’m constantly using this tool to manage my daily life, whether working on projects or writing articles, making videos, etc.
「Take It Easy to Roam, Roam Just In Time」 It’s a live-streaming I did recently in a PKM community, and it’s also a summary of my experience of using Roam Research for more than 2 years.
So the content I shared is more detailed, and I can recommend you to check it out. In addition, I have made more than 60 videos on Bilibili (also uploaded to YouTube), which is also a process of continuous output and learning.
What’s particularly fun is that in 2020 I also had some job opportunities as a result of my exploration and learning about Roam Research. I went to Alibaba and talked to the interviewer about Roam Research, at that time, the interviewer felt very excited.
And on February 22, 2022, I joined a purely remote-work company Parabol.co, and started a new way of “remote working from home”. It also has to do with what I create on the internet, it’s really amazing!
So, Roam Research is a new tool that not only takes up one of my own interests, but also gives me a chance to “explore the future of work”.
In fact, I am very grateful for these opportunities, especially because I met a lot of very interesting people, especially the executives of ByteDance, Xiaomi, Microsoft, and Alibaba (the kind I would not normally come into contact with) all noticed the bi-directional links and promoted the development of related products.
A brief summary
After these 3 stories are shared, we can have a basic overview of the bi-directional link.
The concept of bi-directional link is not new, in fact, the term “hypertext” was released by Ted Nelson in 1963, at which time the original concept of hypertext already included bi-directional linking.
It was not until Roam Research was launched in 2022 that the concept of bi-directional link was introduced to the general public, and many knowledge management tools, including Evernote, Workflowy, etc., began to follow suit with their designs.
Thank you so much for reading this, I will continue with the next two parts, so stay tuned for subsequent updates if you like what I’ve written. (Twitter)
- ✅ Part Ⅰ: 3 Stories about Roam Research, Starting with Project Xanadu
- Part Ⅱ: 1 Core Feature of Roam Research: [[Bi-directional Link]]
- Part Ⅲ: My Top 2 Roam Research Use Cases: Input/Output
