Nifty!

But how do you avoid the "gorilla arm" problem with large touch-screen monitors?

A touch screen table would solve that problem. In a perfect world we would have desks whose entire surface is a multi-touch screen, not as a replacement but additionally to "regular" monitors to allow exactly these kinds of interfaces.

Not really--you'd still be using large-arm motions on a large surface, holding up your arms so you wouldn't generate false touches. Even palm detection won't help, as you'd still need the large-scope motions to tie things together.

It's a kind of belated consolation that people are finally waking up to the potential of transclusion, structured notetaking and active reading in assisting and boosting human intelligence, decades after the onset of the still unfulfilled visions of forefathers such as Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart; and it's definitely great to see skillful people working on the vastly unpopular field of general-purpose production software of the literary kind. But this is just the thing that ideally shouldn't be productized and shut into the walled garden of an iPad application, unable to flexibly integrate into a user's broader systems of knowledge and memory. Hopefully the technology will have much more extensive implementations beyond the application.

We should have had this kind of thing as a standard part of our common user-facing software by now; in all software related to reading and writing. All implemented in free software, open protocols and standards, in a distributed manner, not tied to one company or organization. In 2012, I should have been able to practically link a paragraph of my comment here to a line on a local PDF file, another paragraph on that file to a particular portion of a web video, and string a group of such links and transclusions together, comment further on them, keep them under version control, and share them with others, without being tied to a single service or application. This stuff should be infrastructure.

And this is what personal computers were supposed to be all about, before the original naive and optimistic vision of enhancing human intelligence and distributed production and sharing gave way to the current situation where personal computers are used mainly to mindlessly consume centrally produced crap. I'm still looking forward to and willing to work towards an updated variant of that vision, but it's going to be an uphill battle.

Assuming you keep track of this area, are there any other interesting projects out there?

I assume you mean recent and active projects; there's nothing recent I can remember that attempts to do the kind of thing I tried to describe in the second paragraph of my comment. (Which is why I intend to start working on my own modest, desperate attempt at it in the following months.)

However, there are various projects, some of them historical, that have attempted to tackle it in limited contexts, or implemented parts of it, or have envisioned it in holistic systems that are now outdated. Almost all of the somewhat interesting ones I've come across can unfortunately be classified as one of the following: 1) Productized, narrowly focused yet-another-app 2) Academic or overly specialized in-house or personal project with no real effort at widespread usability 3) Unmaintained and outdated 4) Essentially vaporware

With that said, here are a few links of interest, with the forefathers noted first:

* Xanadu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

* NLS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29

* Relations: http://relations-rcp.sourceforge.net/

* Zettelkasten: http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/index.php

* semantic-notes: https://github.com/jsomers/semantic-notes

* Synapsen: http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen/shots_e.html

* flashbake: https://github.com/commandline/flashbake

* ConnectedText: http://www.connectedtext.com/

* The Literary Machine: http://sommestad.com/lm.htm

* Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html

* Smart Notebooks (currently seeking funding on Kickstarter): http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-noteboo...

* Bibkosh: http://www.bibkosh.com

* gitmarks: https://github.com/hmason/gitmarks

* Lifestreams: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html , http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/fflifestreams.html

* Locker: https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker

* Telehash: http://telehash.org/

* Singly: https://www.singly.com/

* pan.do/ra: https://pan.do/ra#about

* Papers: http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/

Some related reading:

* http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/1.html

* http://takingnotenow.blogspot.co.uk/

* http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/notebook.html

* http://web.archive.org/web/20100422130439/http://gilest.org/...

* http://web.archive.org/web/20100108034547/http://software-li...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

* http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html

* http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/reading-with-the-stars...

* http://www.openannotation.org/

* http://www.katsommers.com/2010/11/02/web-narrative/

* http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/tag/dymaxion-chronofile

* http://www.jagshouse.com/swyft.html

* http://al3x.net/2009/01/31/against-everything-buckets.html

Will your work somehow integrate/interface with the work these guys are doing: http://hypothes.is

Here is a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNrAS979MfA

* Smallest federated wiki: http://wardcunningham.github.com

Stanislav Datskovskiy (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8) is a particular favourite writer of mine, on this kind of topic.

Also, would you like any help?

I like it, but in all honesty - I don't see how multi-touch brings any advantage compared to a keyboard+mouse for this application.

The workflow is a bit different yes, but there is barely anything in there that really takes advantage of multi-touch gestures more than zoom, and there are many great zoom implementations available when using a mouse.

Regardless this could be quite useful, my biggest gripe is exporting your work, you should be able to export it to a PDF or something so that anyone can read or print it while still retaining comments, links etc. in a good, intuitive, way. That will make or break it in my eyes (granted I've only glanced at it so far) and I didn't see anything about that on the site/videos.

Not saying that it is badly suitable for multi-touch but I just have a hard time seeing myself working with my hands like that for a long session. Mouse + keyboard is vastly superior in terms of ergonomics and if I will be writing long comments a real keyboard is a must.

On a tablet? Sure, but feels like the UI requires a larger screen than a tablet.