Recent threads on Bernstein's blog and Flickwerk point to an online essay which declares hypertext is no longer cool.

While Berstein is right to note the absence of recognition of Engelbart and Nelson in the critique, he doesn't realize that Engelbart and Nelson are conceiving pre-hypertext systems at the same time McLuhan coins the word cool (1963). Instead, Berstein is thinking of cool as popularity, not as media. Engelbart's and Nelson's ideas fit very nicely with McLuhan's definitions, so, in this sense, hypertext is cool (see a modern version in Everthing2.com's cool writing and, of course, my own writings and ideas on cool).