History
This is the Virtual Travelog of John R. Harris. I have been keeping a professional journal most of my career and have note books going back to 1992. In 1995 I left my employer in Nottingham in the UK to work on a web based startup with a colleague. He had convinced me that the web was going to make the internet ubiquitous and we needed to get involved. On the first page of the new notebook I christened for the occasion I wrote – John Harris, travels in Cyberspace 16/03/95. That entry was the real start of this travelog, however it took several more years to make it online.
The note books kept filling up. I emigrated to the USA and continued to focus on the web and the internet. At the end of 2002 I launched this blog. I kept it up pretty regularly for 2 years but then started a new job and it slipped away. I did however continue filling up note books. In early 2009 I made a conscious effort to consolidate and standardize my note taking discipline. This has been very successful and I’m now on my fourth notebook since adopting this new approach. In those four books I have collected some interesting observations that i think would make good blog entries and so I have decided to relaunch Virtual Travelog.
Subject Matter
This travelog concerns the metaphorical segues, chicanes and switch-backs of innovation. The crossroads, circles, and dead-ends of ideas. The emergence of complexity from chaos, and the evolution of order under the pressure of selection. The first movers, furthest seers, engineers, and inventors of the future. The architectural diagrams, maps, and charts that display information and the classification systems, meta models, and ontologies that structure its exchange.
Virtual Travelog is mostly about information technology – how it is realized and the lessons we can learn from each other, and the world around us.