by jeremya on 7/22/15, 12:34 PM with 51 comments
by braythwayt on 7/22/15, 7:10 PM
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.
by shubhamjain on 7/22/15, 7:10 PM
by bithead on 7/23/15, 4:02 AM
by walterbell on 7/22/15, 11:02 PM
by carterehsmith on 7/22/15, 10:24 PM
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).
by rhema on 7/22/15, 9:08 PM
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).
by drallison on 7/22/15, 10:00 PM
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.
by sparkzilla on 7/22/15, 7:49 PM
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/
by catern on 7/23/15, 4:28 AM
by dwhly on 7/28/15, 10:42 PM
by zerker2000 on 7/22/15, 7:26 PM
by hyperion2010 on 7/23/15, 1:24 AM
by dang on 7/22/15, 6:17 PM