Mike: Speaking of the Royal We ...

The session was billed as an interactive exploration of hypertext. On flyers that Will produced and distributed, we extended an invitation to "present our panel." To our knowledge, this was the first audience-participation hypertext at the CCCCs. And, for the most part, it worked.

But there were the inevitable glitches.

Some were technical. When I arrived to load the website on the laptop that had been provided by NCTE for the conference, I found that it had a 16-color driver -- bad news for a site based on 256-color images and backgrounds. At one point, failing to find any drivers on diskette, I thought I'd found the appropriate drivers on a site in Finland. But they were for OS/2, not Windows. In the end, a gracious colleague (thanks, Claudine!) allowed us to use her laptop, and we were able to go ahead with the presentation.

It turned out, however, that most of the audience couldn't see the screen well enough to read the text. And the person who had found himself as the leader of our audience participation group was unfamiliar with the pointing device on the laptop, which slowed navigation through the site.

Some of the glitches were due to the kindness of strangers. We had anticipated that Emily's web would be the most attractive and this turned out to be the case. But we'd also anticipated that our readers would move several screens deep into each of our webs. Most of our cross-links, as a result, were placed several screens into each of the webs.

This was our undoing. In the interest of being fair to each of the members of our group, our readers rarely ventured more than a few screens into a web before moving to another. As a result, the interlinking that we'd expected to occur -- and the discussions such movement would evoke -- didn't take place.

It may also be, as Emily noted in a conversation with me after the conference, that the navigational aids on this site also detracted from more exploratory movement through the site. Emily's point: the structure we developed to weave the five webs together made it too easy to move out of one web and into another. The surprises associated with clicking on a link and not knowing where it would lead -- something we'd expected to be a key element in our discussions of hypertext -- were almost completely missing from our session.

We hope you'll have the opportunity to explore our web in more detail than was possible in the short time that was available to us in Phoenix. And we hope you'll find it at least somewhat as interesting as we've found putting the site together.