The largest companies in the world are building cyberspaces: poets are building cyberspaces. Suddenly, everything's going spatial. Welcome to World 3, a space devoted to exploring the nature of internetworked hypermedia design.

First, a quick word about the structure of World 3. We've tried to design the space to reflect one of the most remarkable attributes of hypertext. Namely, its ability to connect ideas, to draw analogies, to create intelligence.

Although all the contributions were originally constructed independently, many of them have since become fused. Drill down into one, and you'll more than likely find yourself eventually popping up in another - on the wing of a new, related thought. If all this sounds like a sequel to Naked Lunch, all we can say is: William Burroughs, eat your heart out!

What kind of author willingly allows his work to become fused with that of others, to serve as grist in the mill of hypermedia experimentation? Our contributors run the gamut from high-profile hypermedia theorists and practitioners to an up-and-coming generation of design superstars, brim full of new ideas. It's a wild ride.

The decidedly non-linear Deus Ludens weighs in with some heavy concepts (heck, we're talking Big Ideas here!) about the nature of cyberspace. Think of it as metahypertext.

Jay David Bolter may very well rank as the most influential hypermedia thinker of our times. Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired describes his book Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing as "a seminal work in network culture"; while Brian Eno claims: "It may well be that Writing Space does for electronic writing what Gutenberg did for print." In other words, he knows whereof he speaks. We're honored Jay saw fit to contribute Some Thoughts on Web Design.

The Mola Project defies capsule descriptions. (But encapsulate we must.) According to its collaborators - Carolyn Guyer, Michael Joyce, Nigel Kerr, Nancy Lin and Suze Schweitzer - "a densely linked web of surfaces attempts to defuse (diffuse) hierarchy by spatializing and weaving its links -- inspired by (literally: breathing in) the successive adjacencies and eddying of multiple conversations which have for centuries accompanied quilting and other traditional forms of embodied collaborative art. Completed at Easter/Passover 1995." Took the words right out of our mouth.

Ted Nelson continues to play a visionary role in the hypermedia debate (heck, he coined the term). In Transcopyright: Pre-Permission for Virtual Republishing, Ted describes a potential solution to the online copyright problem - one of the thorniest issues facing internetworked hypertext users and publishers.

Content for The Phone is from an original work by John Chris Jones, author of the remarkable book, Designing Designing. The Phone was structured by Jonathan Moberly, creative director of Ellipsis - a forward-thinking architectural publisher in London. Jonathan and his team are, as you might expect, in the business of describing spaces. So it's hardly surprising to find that he's one of the first practitioners to marry structure and meaning more eloquently and effortlessly than most. Jonathan and Chris also collaborated on the non-hierachical list of recommended reading in the Books Recommended by World 3 Contributors section.

And what of the substance within the style? At a fundamental level, hypermedia is nothing if not information. Tom Valovic has long ranked as one of the most eloquent and insightful voices in the computer-mediated communications arena. He is also the author of Corporate Networks, a pioneering work on the subject of the strategic use of telecommunications. Here, he outlines his views on the Quality of Information.

APORIA is an attempt to redefine the "browsing" experience by architect, award-winning furniture designer and illustrator Gong Szeto and artist, art historian and University of Chicago Ph.D. student Kevin Sawad Brooks. Their's is a space where visitors may enter, create a representation of themselves, and leave traces of their activities, while contributing to the evolving composition of the project itself.

With Browser Beatings: Design with Browsers that Suck, Web site designer Mike Kuniavsky (id Software, Knowledge Adventure and Hot Hot Hot) tackles one of most important determiners of interface design. And as the title suggests, he ain't happy.

Nathan Shedroff's Information Interaction Design is a bold effort to present a Unified Field Theory of Design. How bold? As creative director at Vivid Studios in San Francisco, Nathan and his fiercely talented team have created web sites for Borland, 3Com and, of late, Johnny Mmemonic. The latter space is paradigmatic for proving more interesting and influential than the film it was intended to promote.

When not engaged in various Web projects, Stuart Moulthrop co-edits Postmodern Culture. Hegirascope is his first work of fiction since 1992. It contains many things: a fat man on a tired horse, three pairs of star-crossed lovers, the body of H. Marshall McLuhan, a surfer who goes into the light, dreams, visions, a red rock, three paving stones, and a dead parrot. All in answer to the question: What if the word will not keep still? Nuff said.

Richard Oliver is a writer, presentologist and sometime hypermedia designer, based in London. He is co-author,with Bob Cotton, of Understanding Hypermedia and The Cyberspace Lexicon. In As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush Where Are You Now?, he suggests our culture has taken on the provisional character of a hypertext and, that a close look at the achievements of one of the foremost scientific lives of the 20th Century offers many clues to an understanding of the emergence of Proto-Hypertext Man.

Barking Up the Wrong Hierachy reflects Nick Routledge's current obsession with the fundamentals of corporate web design. Nick advances his thesis that effectively marrying business objectives to the wherefores of the Web is far more complicated than seems apparent.

If you find the ideas and opinions of our contributors stimulating, chances are the books they recommend will also add eloquence to your web design efforts. We'll also risk the appearance of logrolling by suggesting you also peruse the books written by World 3 voices.

Snip Here is a collection of fragments. Click here for information on how to contact World 3 and our contributors.