It doesn't happen very often, that one gets to meet a live legend. While I met my fair share of music artists in the past, I think the chance of having made the acquaintance of Theodor Holm Nelson PhD outshadows most, if not all, in the past.

My alma mater provides this new master's curriculum Web Sciences and made sure to invite Ted Nelson to kick off the new class as a guest professor. I have to admit, the first class he held with us, I was not quite sure what to exactly think of him; there was this bit of Emmet Brown-ish genius paired with some frustration about the course history took and also the idea, that things could be much nicer if it wasn't for the fact that people love to resist change. I think one of my favorite quotes I witnessed in real life was:

"Some people think of the web as a great thing. I think of it as a result of my mistakes."

This may sound a little bitter, remorseful, some may call it cookoo bananas, but once you dig in and get behind the history that Ted Nelson helped write, I think he is on to something. It's a lot less hard than you might initially think.
After the first day of teaching, I coincidentally could welcome Mr. Nelson in my apartment, along where he gave a short lecture in a mini setting to my significant other, another German guest professor and me. Seeing his Xanadu®-based ZigZag® in action was impressive, yet I found it a little hard to squeeze the concept into my every day work of programming and designing applications. Taking one step back, looking at the thing as a whole really did the trick for me. It's not just a new way of holding data ? although, using the appropriate API may actually allow Xanadu to be used as a replacement for relational databases ? it's a whole new paradigm.

Over the course of the next days, I saw the concept explained at least thrice and it got clearer every time I saw it. What really made the switch flip for me, was when Dr. Nelson showed the video of Dr. Adam Moore, using ZigZag as a means to display all kinds of information and relationships in biochemistry. You don't need to understand the actual underlying chemistry of the video to be able to appreciate the brilliance and flexibility of the visualization and the slew of possibilities this can bring on. The best thing is: It takes about no time to set up a system and get it ready for data entry:

During lectures, Dr. Nelson delivered a lot of great one-liners, and once the part of the audience that made the effort to open up enough, allowed him to get in sync with them, the information flow became a lot smoother than on the first day. The course instructor Dr. Mittendorfer, who gets all the credit for having managed to get Dr. Nelson to Linz, had told us to see this as a chance to meet a great mind and someone who helped write history. It was up to us to get something valuable out of this opportunity; and right he was.

To me personally, the Web Sciences studies at Johannes Kepler University in Linz might as well be over already. I have experienced more than I hoped and gotten so many new ideas in the first couple of weeks already, that everything from here is just some extra info.