6 ms·

Links as originally imagined were a separate layer of annotation on documents

111 points by jeremya 11y ago

dang 11y ago
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.
- eponeponepon 11y ago
  How about: "This thoughtful article deserved more attention - you won't believe what someone changed its title to..." [edit: you're right though; personally I'd have never bothered with the original title, and it really is a very thought-provoking piece - as so often anything is that talks about Engelbart, Bush &c.]
- lcswi 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    That's true. Are you trying to make an additional point, though?
- krapp 11y ago
  You've pushed threads down because you feared they would obtain more attention than you felt they deserved, just do the opposite in this case and force this one upwards.
braythwayt 11y ago
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.
- zerker2000 11y ago
  http://rbutr.com http://rbutr.com is a contradiction-focused social plugin for linking pages together, I'm not sure how widely used.
  - Aegist 11y ago
    You can see in the Chrome store how many active users the plugin has (which is only one part of what rbutr does): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rbutr/ocnieghejiknjhadhngmmnbfjocbbfpm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rbutr/ocnieghejikn... So it says about 10,300 active plugin users. A more appropriate plugin for the OP's question is Hypothes.is. They're open source, non-profit and have raised over $1.5 million. They have about 7,300 users according to the chrome webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypothesis-web-pdf-annota/bjfhmglciegochdpefhhlphglcehbmek https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypothesis-web-pdf...
- jessriedel 11y ago
  Now that you mention it, it would be great to have a browser plugin that would gather links to several discussion sites (HN, metafilter, the subreddits, etc.).
  - qznc 11y ago
    Here is a Chrome plugin for HN discussions: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discussion/iggcipafbcjfofibfhhelnipahhepmkd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discus...
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  One similar project was _why's mousehole: https://github.com/evaryont/mousehole https://github.com/evaryont/mousehole and hoodwink.d https://github.com/robbyrussell/hoodwinkd https://github.com/robbyrussell/hoodwinkd
  - fiatjaf 11y ago
shubhamjain 11y ago
The amazing thing about the Vannevar Bush's essay is that he didn't made baseless assumptions about future. He predicted thing that can be done the contemporary technologies on the scale which wasn't yet figured out in a time when everyone else was too busy expecting flying cars in future without considering their feasibility.
zerker2000 11y ago
I think the article is too eager to dismiss hotspot-style links, valid as its point about multiple connections may be. The solution I'd prefer would be something like Medium-style inline comments, where the immediate "hotspot" is a number representing a collection of responses, and the links occur inside of those.
- daveloyall 11y ago
  I think the author is more concerned about the source of the links rather than the style. A file separate from the content could contain links and each one could be anchored to the top, bottom, or a particular phrase using ordinary regular expressions. /ordinary regular expressions/href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression /$/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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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-rights-00#section-5 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-stakeholder-rig... . :)
sparkzilla 11y ago
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/
- eponeponepon 11y ago
  I got round the footnotes issue by placing the source link on the verbs in the text, while internal linking is handled by nouns. That's a very elegant idea; I congratulate you very genuinely. I wonder where you'd head if you had a third category of links, though? The single biggest problem that gnaws at me is what to do when a single (hotspot|link|icon) needs to point the reader to two completely unrelated remote resources (e.g. a scholarly edition of some text where notes on the original manuscript and editorial additions refer to the same segment of text - or worse, overlapping segments. In the print world, the only options are this kind of thing[1][2], or eschewing markers in the text in favour of references in the notes - but carrying either over when so many more options are available electronically feels lumpen to me. Drop-down menus are an obvious solution, but have huge dependency on the display agent to behave properly. [edit: layout, phrasing]
drallison 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > Ted's visionary ideas permeate our thinking today. Yes and no. A mutated version of them that turns out to work better, perhaps.
  - asadotzler 11y ago
    And that's how most change happens. Radical ideas watered down and made palatable to larger audiences.
rhema 11y ago
>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).
carterehsmith 11y ago
I find Rap Genius implementation of this quite good. For example http://genius.com/1500995/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret/Our-tools-said-6330ms http://genius.com/1500995/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret/O... 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).
walterbell 11y ago
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
hyperion2010 11y ago
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
bithead 11y ago
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 11y ago
  This seems interesting.. Anything more in depth to share?
  - bithead 11y ago
    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.
catern 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
By the way, feel free to annotate the above article with Hypothes.is: https://via.hypothes.is/http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-conversation/ https://via.hypothes.is/http://hapgood.us/2015/07/21/beyond-...

111 points by jeremya 11y ago

dang 11y ago

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.

eponeponepon 11y ago
How about: "This thoughtful article deserved more attention - you won't believe what someone changed its title to..." [edit: you're right though; personally I'd have never bothered with the original title, and it really is a very thought-provoking piece - as so often anything is that talks about Engelbart, Bush &c.]
lcswi 11y ago
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 11y ago
  That's true. Are you trying to make an additional point, though?
krapp 11y ago
You've pushed threads down because you feared they would obtain more attention than you felt they deserved, just do the opposite in this case and force this one upwards.

braythwayt 11y ago

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.

zerker2000 11y ago
http://rbutr.com http://rbutr.com is a contradiction-focused social plugin for linking pages together, I'm not sure how widely used.
- Aegist 11y ago
  You can see in the Chrome store how many active users the plugin has (which is only one part of what rbutr does): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rbutr/ocnieghejiknjhadhngmmnbfjocbbfpm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rbutr/ocnieghejikn... So it says about 10,300 active plugin users. A more appropriate plugin for the OP's question is Hypothes.is. They're open source, non-profit and have raised over $1.5 million. They have about 7,300 users according to the chrome webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypothesis-web-pdf-annota/bjfhmglciegochdpefhhlphglcehbmek https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypothesis-web-pdf...
jessriedel 11y ago
Now that you mention it, it would be great to have a browser plugin that would gather links to several discussion sites (HN, metafilter, the subreddits, etc.).
- qznc 11y ago
  Here is a Chrome plugin for HN discussions: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discussion/iggcipafbcjfofibfhhelnipahhepmkd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discus...
steveklabnik 11y ago
One similar project was _why's mousehole: https://github.com/evaryont/mousehole https://github.com/evaryont/mousehole and hoodwink.d https://github.com/robbyrussell/hoodwinkd https://github.com/robbyrussell/hoodwinkd
- fiatjaf 11y ago

shubhamjain 11y ago

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.

zerker2000 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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-rights-00#section-5 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-stakeholder-rig... . :)

sparkzilla 11y ago

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/

eponeponepon 11y ago
I got round the footnotes issue by placing the source link on the verbs in the text, while internal linking is handled by nouns. That's a very elegant idea; I congratulate you very genuinely. I wonder where you'd head if you had a third category of links, though? The single biggest problem that gnaws at me is what to do when a single (hotspot|link|icon) needs to point the reader to two completely unrelated remote resources (e.g. a scholarly edition of some text where notes on the original manuscript and editorial additions refer to the same segment of text - or worse, overlapping segments. In the print world, the only options are this kind of thing[1][2], or eschewing markers in the text in favour of references in the notes - but carrying either over when so many more options are available electronically feels lumpen to me. Drop-down menus are an obvious solution, but have huge dependency on the display agent to behave properly. [edit: layout, phrasing]

drallison 11y ago

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 11y ago
> Ted's visionary ideas permeate our thinking today. Yes and no. A mutated version of them that turns out to work better, perhaps.
- asadotzler 11y ago
  And that's how most change happens. Radical ideas watered down and made palatable to larger audiences.

rhema 11y ago

>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).

carterehsmith 11y ago

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

walterbell 11y ago

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

hyperion2010 11y ago

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

bithead 11y ago

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 11y ago
This seems interesting.. Anything more in depth to share?
- bithead 11y ago
  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.

catern 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago

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