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The HitchHiker's Guide in Your Pocket
gilest was the first to tell us about Douglas Adams' newest development: a real life Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The first version should be out next year, with a monster amount of content. Over the next couple years, they expect to incorporate GSM, and have a modem and Internet connection in the box. And, of course, they'll put the "Don't Panic" in large-friendly letters on the front of the machine.
I think it would be of extreme use if the Creators of the Hitchiker's (HandHeld) Guidebook work together with the Let's Go Guidebook people. This would allow The device to become more than just a "toy". Which is what I believe the website version is. The Let's Go Guidebook is *the* perfect guidebook for the hitchiker mindset. In my travels abroad, and even at home, the Let's Go Guidebook always provided me with the most succint (but not necessarily budget oriented) information. Let's Go has never failed me yet, where many other guidebooks have - many guidebooks leave out nightlife and travel arrangements.
Joseph Elwell.
Quick intro - I work at TDV and I'm one of the people behind h2g2.com and douglasadams.com. (My h2g2 homepage is here) I've just spent most of the evening frantically running around with one of my colleagues trying to optimise bits of the site in the face of the Slashdot onslaught (and it's not just Slashdot... PR put out a press release earlier and we weren't adequately prepared for the results... several lessons learnt there...)
Anyway, time for some response to many of the points raised:
- Most of you seem to really like Douglas's stuff and h2g2 too. We're very glad - the Slashdot crowd are legendarily hard to please!
- Whilst there are lots of similarities between h2g2 and Everything, they're very different in many ways too. I like Everything a lot (I've got quite a few entries in there myself) and I like the way it's based on a single neat idea that's just expanded over a whole database. Everything is designed to be *without* editorial control - it's based entirely on user voting, so it looks and feels pretty random and organic, which is not a criticism - that's how it's meant to be. h2g2 has an editorial direction - to move it in that direction, it has a dedicated editorial team (most of whom are, like Slashdot's moderators, unpaid users). Another difference is that h2g2 has a whole load of community functionality much more akin to Slashdot than to Everything, along with quite unique features such as the user journals. (They're similar to the current fashion of "weblogs" like scripting.com and robotwisdom.com) And we're adding new features all the time - new ways of creating documents, new ways of using forums, and other entirely new sections.
- Some of you are complaining that most h2g2 entries aren't very funny - a valid complaint, but we have good reason for it. Firstly, as most of you are saying, the Guide should primarily be useful and secondarily entertaining. Secondly, we've had to go out of our way to tell people not to try and be funny, simply because so many users were trying to write like Douglas and failing miserably. Writing like Douglas Adams is hard. (That's why it takes him so bloody long to get a book out.) Also, humour is a much more subjective quality than usefulness, and we want the Guide to be as universal as possible. We're not saying that we don't want entries that are funny, just that it shouldn't be a researcher's primary focus. (It should be noted, though, that there's nothing stopping you sticking up loads of random, funny nonsense up on h2g2 - it'll be visible to everyone, just won't be part of the core Guide)
- As for the usefulness of the Guide's current content, we're working on that. The first problem we're tackling is streamlining the editorial process to get more of the huge submissions backlog into the Guide. Then there's a much bigger problem to tackle, which is how to classify all the information in such a way that it can be searched, linked and delivered intelligently. This is such a massive doozy of a problem that I'm not going to say much more, save to say that I can see information scientists featuring much more prominently in the web's future once the major sites have the simple problems of content management sorted out. But anyway: no, we don't have much content yet, but h2g2 is a young and rapidly expanding project with a universal subject domain. It'll take time and effort.
- As for the gadget itself, we can't say that much because a) of lots of secret behind-the-scenes stuff with potential hardware partners and b) we're concentrating much more on the design of the information services (i.e. h2g2.com) than the platform it's delivered to. Ideally, we shouldn't have to do much platform design at all, as it'll be open, existing standards most of the way, which is (as I'm sure you'd agree) the most sensible way of doing it. But, yeah, we like shiny toys and want one with our name on it soon as poss.
- h2g2 needs you. After all, don't say you never dreamed about being a Field Researcher for The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Now you can. Cool, huh?
-- YozQuestion 1: Couldn't a similar thing be done with any connected organizer? Just paint "Don't Panic" on the cover and give it an encyclopedia that gets updated through a modem from time to time. I could probably do it with a Palm IIIx, but it would be even easier with one of the new Visors. If this takes off, will we see copycats?
:)
Question 2: It struck me that www.h2g2.com is basically everything.blockstackers.com... Rob, why don't you go to work and make one of these! Everything is more complete and generally funnier than h2g2. If only you could use the name and logo, right?
Just a thought or two
-efisher
---
this
I reached in the back seat and handed her...my towel.
"You keep a towel in your car?" she asked, incredulously. She was not a geek girl. Very pretty, but not a geek girl. I think she thought it was really strange to keep a towel in the car, despite the fact that it was right then an incredibly useful thing to have.
Hmmm, maybe in the personals ad I placed recently I should have said, "ISO a woman who knows where her towel is."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Ever since the advent of the web, I (and innumerable other Hitchhikers fans) have noted the similarities - a huge collection of data from countless contributors with incompetant editors, often faulty information, and a great deal of humor. The creation of a true hitchhikers guide using the web was pleasently inevitable. I've often thought /. would eventually come closest to approximating it.
/. could give Adams some pointers on building a community and group moderation - the "one cockroach" rumor that could screw a far flung restaurant doesn't work if the posters are rated and moderated.
Unfortunately, H2G2 has far too much of the incompetent editing and too little of the clever humor and actually useful information. Just witness the lengthy expositions on black helicopters, the CIA plot to kill Clinton, and wrong instructions on how to do things. One poster noted how great this would be if ones car broke down in the middle of nowhere and they could get instructions on how to fix it. Given the quality of the content, PANIC might be a better slogan.
That being said, a mobile device that always knows where it is and has access to all the information you could possible want (and more) is an exciting concept. Not only could it tell you about the local culture and architecture of the Turkish prison you're in (another post), but also how to bribe the judge, carve your way out with the side of the "Guide" case, or how to use your towel to prevent some unfortunate prison experiences.
Maybe the guys here at
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
I can see a myriad of used for the Guide, if they implement it something like the literary equivalent. Imagine losing a fan belt out on US-71, and not knowing how to put it back on.. Not only will the Guide keep you from panicking, it could potentially tell you which service stations you could call, as well as how to put the belt back on yourself. You're having trouble finding your destination? Grab a map off of the Guide; it's easier than finding the Interstellar Spaceway. Can't get the firewall to cooperate? Pull the specs from the Guide, and then use it to SSH onto the box. Have a german engineer you need to communicate with? The Guide includes an electronic Babelfish. In a meeting and you NEED the 'netcat' manpage? Don't panic, the Guide has it! Some hints on beating a Sun boot PROM into submission? Hit the Guide first. Wake up on a strange spacecraft with a towel in your hand? Is the Tlaziam empire tightening her grip on the Acensus Cluster? Well, those may not be covered in the Guide, but I'm sure you see the point..
.sig: Now legally binding!