The Net effect

I Googled him, only to discover that he'd died in 1999. One more click and I found a portrait of McKenzie in the permanent collection of the National Library of New Zealand. Looking at it, I was transported back to a cool autumn day in Oxfordshire, the windows open, a modern room in the ancient city. McKenzie held a book fanned open on his upturned palms, fantastically engaged. "This is remarkable technology," he said with a whiff of his native New Zealand accent. "A wafer-thin sheet of paper, yet so much information."

I found McKenzie, mourned him, and revisited Brideshead in about three minutes. Without Internet access, this could have taken weeks. I had not stayed in touch with him, although I referred to his insights from time to time -- particularly the way he saw television, the Internet, e-mail and every other transient mode of communication stored in his ideal library system, one that trounced Vannevar Bush's Memex.

McKenzie's ideal library was the World Wide Web. His first speculative talk on the subject was a British Library Panizzi Lecture in 1986, four years before Sir Timothy Berners-Lee invented the first World Wide Web server in Geneva, Switzerland.

"The Internet is a volume in our library," Ackerman says, "a colorful, miscellaneous, and serendipitous one -- but not a replacement for books, and certainly not an alternative to spending time in the world and just paying attention to things." Moulitsas believes it's the future, and the old guard needs to get with the times.

For the time being, both of them are right.