If you want an honest response, I will say that I did not really find this article as entertaining than I thought it would be. However, the writer does bring up a few good points—especially in regards to his "Memex" device. The way way we store files today is not too unlike the linear storage that the writer complains about. In fact, it's pretty much the same. The difference, however, is that, while we store things in hierarchy, we label all of our data bins sequentially, enabling us quick access through mathematic rigor (search algorithms, hyperlinks, and whatnot). Other than that, however, the article wasn't that great.
Where to begin...
I suppose the real question is "where does it end?" This particular project, I think, does well in choosing keywords, but it fails in that it doesn't give the user any sense of where he is as he navigates the story. I know I was supposed to read the whole thing before writing an evaluation, but I honestly don't know whether or not I succeeded in that endeavor. I clicked most of the links that I came across, but I never quite knew if there were more nested in some other parts of the narrative. I suppose that if that was the project writer's intent, it was successful.
I liked this one. It still gave the user the freedom to "navigate" (or move his eyes, really) to each of the major settings, but the juxtaposition of the three areas ensures that the reader is never lost. If he chooses, he can read them all in order—or he can read one and ignore the others or read them out of order—whatever.
Like the Timeline that I liked, this one also allows the user to navigate individually through the various settings, but it doesn't allow the reader to read them all at once. However, because the user is forced to view one setting and time at a time, the screen is never too cluttered with information that the user may not necessarily want. The time display for each room also shows the user exactly where he is in the narrative. My only gripe with this one is that there's no way to jump from one time to another.
I don't really know what I want to do with my interactive narrative piece, to be honest. Well, I do, to some extent, but I also want to save that idea for a later project. I've been toying around with the idea of drawing a web-based comic strip, but, instead of having natural, chronological progression from panel to panel, it will have a variable amount ogf "hotspots" in each panel that direct the user to other panels. More than likely, it'll incorporate either the "MAP" HTML tag or DHTML in some way. I don't know though. I'm just thinking about it.