
Links as originally imagined were a separate layer of annotation on documents - jeremya
http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-conversation/
======
braythwayt
I recall some efforts to make a social browser, where people visiting a web
page could leave comments on it and read comments from others.

IIRC (and I fear I don't RC), the web industry hated this idea because they
couldn't control and monetize the conversation around their content. Of
course, we now do this exact thing with sites like Slash Dot, Digg, and Hacker
News, only there is this step of going to the social site to see the popular
links.

If you go to a page and wonder what HN has to say about it, you have to do a
search for the URL by yourself. (Perhaps there is a browser add-on that does
this?)

Taking comments to a place where you could annotate the document and not just
discuss the page as a whole is the next step for sites like HN. Of course,
there is the pesky problem of the sites hating this and using every legal tool
in their arsenal to prevent you from presenting this as an interface.

~~~
Aegist
There are quite a few efforts out there. Someone has already mentioned rbutr
(actually my personal project) - you can view it in action without the plugin
by just adding rbutr.com/ to the front of any URL, eg:
[http://rbutr.com/http://www.realfarmacy.com/johns-hopkins-
sc...](http://rbutr.com/http://www.realfarmacy.com/johns-hopkins-scientist-
reveals-shocking-report-flu-vaccines/)

However rbutr isn't really what you've described here. What you've described
is either

[https://hypothes.is/](https://hypothes.is/) or

[http://fiskkit.com](http://fiskkit.com) or

[https://factlink.com/](https://factlink.com/)

Oh, also, Hypothes.is had previously put together this spreadsheet on Google
Docs which lists all of the previous efforts to make web annotation
applications. It hasn't been kept up to date though so I keep a local one up
to date now, just in case this is ever lost:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aujm_HldNh4WdHJ...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aujm_HldNh4WdHJrcTNIZ2tOQWhETjNDMGdkRjZEVGc#gid=0)

~~~
dwhly
Hey Sean, Dan Whaley from Hypothes.is here. We would absolutely love your
edits and updates! Happy to collaborate on this. You can email me ...
dwhaley@h...

------
shubhamjain
The amazing thing about the Vannevar Bush's essay is that he didn't made
baseless assumptions about future. He predicted thing that can be done the
contemporary technologies on the scale which wasn't yet figured out in a time
when everyone else was too busy expecting flying cars in future without
considering their feasibility.

------
bithead
So I do something perhaps similar to Bush's trail idea and perhaps not. I use
google bookmarks to build my own set of links for a number of given topics
(tags). I've put the javascript for adding as bookmark into a bookmark item so
throwing the URL to something interesting and tagging it with subject tags
relevant to me is as easy as selecting a menu item. To date I have over 1359
tags. For a given tag, say MPLS, overlay transport, civil war, central african
precolonial women's rights, or hubble pics, I end up with a list of links to
documents about that topic interesting to me. For the most part I keep the
tags narrowly focused and nearly always have multiple tags per link. So the
tags _roughly_ correlate to trails, although obviously not completely. But, as
I understand Bush's thinking on it, kind of.

~~~
IlPeach
This seems interesting.. Anything more in depth to share?

~~~
bithead
If you have a google account, you can use it at bookmarks.google.com. The web
interface is primary, but if you have your bookmarks bar visible, you can drag
the 'Add Bookmark' link to your toolbar, and it will place a button there that
when clicked will popup a window that will add the URL of wherever you were
when you clicked it to the page at bookmarks.google.com, complete with fields
for title, notes, and tags. So each person's bookmarks.google.com page will
have a list of tags and recently added bookmarks. It's very straightforward,
and reminds of Bush's trails idea.

------
walterbell
W3C 2104 Web Annotations Workshop report, with slides and video,
[http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/report.html](http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/report.html)

------
carterehsmith
I find Rap Genius implementation of this quite good. For example
[http://genius.com/1500995/James-somers-herokus-ugly-
secret/O...](http://genius.com/1500995/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret/Our-
tools-said-6330ms)

Medium has annotations too, and IIRC newer versions of IE have this
functionality built-in so that it works for any site.

That said, as the OP points out, web pages (and your annotations with them)
change or disappear all the time, so if you need to keep something as a
reference in your "memex", you may want to scrape it (Evernote etc).

------
rhema
>There is no class of trail blazers.

I think this post takes a narrow view of what constitutes a trail and link.
From listicles, Pinterest boards, and even your Facebook feed, people use the
internet to connect to different links and articles. This process of curation
occurs at personal (Pinterest) and at large (Wikipedia).

There are, indeed, people who make a living from annotating and associating
articles and information (see the HN front page and brainpickings).

------
drallison
The author quotes: “Everyone here will of course say they are carrying on his
work, by whatever twisted interpretation. I for one carry on his work by
keeping the links outside the file, as he did.” – Ted Nelson, eulogizing Doug
Engelbart.

This is a hint. People interested in this topic should study the work of Ted
Nelson and Project Xanadu. Ted's visionary ideas permeate our thinking today.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Ted's visionary ideas permeate our thinking today.

Yes and no. A mutated version of them that turns out to work better, perhaps.

~~~
asadotzler
And that's how most change happens. Radical ideas watered down and made
palatable to larger audiences.

------
sparkzilla
I think the Bush essay is totally fascinating. I have never seen it before and
it's amazing to think it was written such a long time ago. However, both it
and the Federated Wiki both miss an important part of the how textual
information is created and linked on the web, by talking about "articles". In
the essay the user reads through articles and links between articles, while in
wiki systems the contributors' goal is usually to build an article. IMHO the
focus on creating articles is the cause of a great many problems on wiki
systems, and it also influences the discussion of linking.

Taking Wikipedia as an example, readers build up an article piece by piece to
create a long text article. However, much of the information inside the
article can be better represented as data. Articles are rigid, and the text
inside them cannot be manipulated easily. For example, instead of a long
article, a biography can be represented as a timeline of events. That timeline
of events (as data) can then be manipulated (filtered and sorted) by the end
user to give whatever view they want. It's not just a matter of following a
trail (as the Bush text says), but of collecting the information as you go.

Instead of acting as a database of facts or events, Wikipedia acts like a book
(a paper encyclopedia). Sure it has interlinked pages, but that's where it
stops. Because it acts like a book it seems acceptable to have its external
links represented as footnotes in a reference section under the main text.
Federated wiki runs into the same problem too because it's focus is also on
articles -- the result of collaboration is a page that cannot act as data.

But the web is not a book and both articles and footnotes (and lack of other
multimedia features) are not native to the way it functions. I think there are
many better solutions to this problem than going back to footnotes. The medium
is the message and solutions need to stop trying to make the web work like a
book, but to make it work for the web.

I have been working on much of the above on my site. I got round the footnotes
issue by placing the source link on the _verbs_ in the text, while internal
linking is handled by nouns. [http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-broken-
links/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-broken-links/)

~~~
nbadg
The critiques you raise against Wikipedia, both here and in the linked post --
skeuomorphism, functional fixation, aversion to rich/embedded content, etc --
I think are very apt.

I'll echo eponeponepon's comment: very sincerely, it's an elegant approach,
but what happens with more than 2 links? In particular, (and this is already a
concern with only the two links), do you have any UI cues that those links are
separate? Because I'd be concerned (I'm paranoid about this on reddit) that,
without additional UI cues, it seems like they're the same link. Amusingly I
had this exact problem on your blog post, even though I'd already read the
explanation: in the final "Barack Obama signs Minimum Wage executive order" I
was expecting the orange link highlight on "Barack Obama signs" to be one
link, and the black "Minimum Wage executive order" to be another, despite
having just read subject vs verb linking.

Might I suggest two link classes with slightly different CSS colors? If you're
already using automatic page formatting and link generation, you could just
alternate between the two classes, thereby providing an immediate visual cue
that they're different links.

~~~
spc476
I've done that for my blog
([http://boston.conman.org/](http://boston.conman.org/)) where darker colors
refer to links "further away" (brightest are internal links to other blog
entries, darker are links to external sites) although the effect may be too
subtle.

It also only helps if the reader knows of this (and in my case, that's pretty
much been me).

~~~
sparkzilla
It's a bit confusing. It's probably best to underline the external links.

------
catern
It's interesting to see some of the contemporary systems of the World Wide
Web. Does anyone know of a good article exploring why the Web won and the
other systems all faded away?

~~~
dredmorbius
Tim O'Reilly has written on this a few times, describing how and why ORA chose
to pursue HTML/HTTP rather than other proprietary options. _Open Sources_
contains one instance IIRC.

------
dwhly
By the way, feel free to annotate the above article with Hypothes.is:
[https://via.hypothes.is/http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-...](https://via.hypothes.is/http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-
conversation/)

------
zerker2000
I think the article is too eager to dismiss hotspot-style links, valid as its
point about multiple connections may be. The solution I'd prefer would be
something like Medium-style inline comments, where the immediate "hotspot" is
a number representing a collection of responses, and the links occur inside of
those.

~~~
daveloyall
I think the author is more concerned about the source of the links rather than
the style.

A file separate from the content could contain links and each one could be
anchored to the top, bottom, or a particular phrase using ordinary regular
expressions.

    
    
        /ordinary regular expressions/href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
        /$/text="This link is at the bottom";href=http://news.ycombinator.com
    

An observation: promoting 3rd party links to first-class status need not deny
the author the ability to create hotspot links. I, for one, would configure my
memex to always show the author's own links (of any style, as an overlay) and
also any links that my friends and family might have created.

I'm not sure how my memex could locate links made by people I don't know. But,
I imagine that the federated wiki people or the DHT people or the BTC people
might have some ideas.

~~~
dunham
If the document were html, something like epubcfi might work better than
regular expressions. This is what the epub people are recommending for a
similar use case - sharing highlights and notes in epub books whose content
may be updated.

For locating links/comments from people you don't know, I'd imagine a service
like Google. Something that indexes the entire web and answers queries about
which links overlay this document. I'd think they'd have to be ranked somehow.
(Technically, Google already does this with "link:[http://..."](http://...")
queries, but standard HTML links don't reference document fragments.)

~~~
daveloyall
Never heard of _epubcfi_ but yes, if they came up with a way to highlight
specific portions of a text, then yep, that would do it.

Regarding using google as a lookup service for something as fundamental as
this.. No. It's important for the health of the Internet that we not do that.
See [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-stakeholder-
rig...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-stakeholder-
rights-00#section-5) . :)

------
hyperion2010
There are some people working on this on the science/annotation side [1]. I
know there were good reasons why TBL didn't go with bidirectional links, but
we are still paying for it to this day.

1\. [https://hypothes.is](https://hypothes.is)

------
dang
This thoughtful article deserves more interesting discussion than I fear its
generic title will obtain for it, so we've changed the title to a (compressed)
representative sentence. Happy to change it again if anyone suggests something
better.

~~~
lcswi
Trust me, dozens of people think the same day after day but they don't have
the privilege of choosing their own titles for submissions.

~~~
dang
That's true. Are you trying to make an additional point, though?

