Links as originally imagined were a separate layer of annotation on documents | Hacker News Reader

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

hapgood.us

111 pointsjeremya51 comments

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.

http://rbutr.com is a contradiction-focused social plugin for linking pages together, I'm not sure how widely used.

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/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...

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.).

Here is a Chrome plugin for HN discussions: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discus...

One similar project was _why's mousehole: https://github.com/evaryont/mousehole and hoodwink.d https://github.com/robbyrussell/hoodwinkd

How did this hoodwink.d worked?

It's been a while, but as I recall, when it started it involved a proxy to inject the client code into pages, and a hosts file mapping that pointed an invalid FQDN ___._ to the backend, whose IP you had to get from someone who already knew it. Then, once you were in, there was also a karma system which limited the capabilities of low-scored users, and karma was hard to earn.

All told, it gave a strong impression of being less a web annotation system, and more a secret club for soi-disant cool kids. I didn't stay in long; a couple of days, no more.

That's interesting and strange. Thank you.

There is https://hypothes.is/ which provides this additional layer as a browser plugin. And I vaguely remember that there were others.

There have been many such systems. I built one in the early 2000s and tried to raise money around it, to no avail. At the time there were several commercial competitors, including one well-funded venture called ThirdVoice. Wikipedia has some information on the history of the genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation .

There where a bunch of us trying it. We created a corporate version for web site annotation and collaboration. We lost our best chance for funding just as the market cratered.

Having seen several more since then I don't think the market is there for it. People still rather print/screen capture/write an email/annotate PDF versions, about changes in websites rather than use an annotation tool on the page it seems.

> People still rather print/screen capture/write an email/annotate PDF versions, about changes in websites rather than use an annotation tool on the page it seems.

The reason seems fairly obvious - printing/screen capture/PDFs are off-line. Permanent and under user's control. Internet based annotations are inherently unstable - one way today, different tomorrow, completely gone next week. I always found the concept a great thing for sharing thoughts with people, but a terrible one for personal notes.

I don't think I put it in the right context. Personal notes wasn't what I was aiming for, but collaboration around content.

I made a very early version of something like this in 2002 using a loophole that allowed me to frame content in such a way that the original site was visible in an iframe with avatars and speech balloons for the visitors floating over the iframe. Unfortunately the next release of the major browsers closed that loophole (because it could be used in bad ways just as easily as it could be used in good ways). That was a real bummer, I really liked the idea of 'meeting' people on other websites if you both visited through the portal.

Maybe with the current generation of browsers there is another way to achieve the same effect.

On websites with lots of visitors this would likely not work but then you might limit the visible entries to those from some slice through the population based on certain criteria (location or other demographic data).

Zotero covers a lot of this but it's designed as an individual not a social experience. https://www.zotero.org/

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...

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

https://hypothes.is/ or

http://fiskkit.com or

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...

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

W3C 2104 Web Annotations Workshop report, with slides and video, http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/report.html

I find Rap Genius implementation of this quite good. For example 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).

>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).

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.

> Ted's visionary ideas permeate our thinking today.

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

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

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/

  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]

A popup or dropdown could be used to show multiple external links. We have found though that if we need to add an extra source, we simply add an extra sentence that has its own verb. For example:

Person A claims that Person B did something, but person C claims otherwise.

We use a different source links on each italicized verb. This works for us, due to the way we write posts, although there are some edge cases. It'd be interesting to see if it works for other sites with different requirements. The principle is to avoid footnotes and try to match the links meaning directly with the text. As the other poster mentioned, there perhaps should be a color distinction, or some other identifier.

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.

Thank you for the compliment. I was looking at the Barack Obama link too and thinking the same thing. Either using different colors, or a small popup that gives more information, would work.

I've done that for my blog (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).

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

I think it is logical to want a curated database as a companion to wikipedia. WP aims to be an encyclopedia - a collection of articles on a subject; not a collection of data, a dictionary, a taxonomy/ontology, a time-series database of world history.

That doesn't mean such efforts aren't interesting - see eg:

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/

But I think it is important to realize that both can be useful. Perhaps there is room for something that blends traditional hypertext/hypermedia and articles better - fundamentally I think such a system will be more like a complex (object) programming system than text. It would need to be somewhat self-organizing (eg: do how would you like to present a list of published works; on a timeline? With short reviews? In a map?) - and it would probably have similar issues that a large multi-user codebase has.

I suppose lively-kernel.org moght be one approach to making something like that (smalltalk-like js run-time in the browser with webdav for code/data storage).

I have to say that whilst Wikipedia's referencing implementation and policies are horrible from an editor perspective, I think they're about right for the reader. The raison d'être for the footnotes is to indicate the statement can be verified for editors and other determined fact-checkers rather than to point the average reader towards other encyclopedic material, and many of the references are page references for dead tree media. As such they're not intended to be the first point of departure for the median reader, and so shouldn't have the same prominence as the internal links or "further reading" external links, let alone significantly more prominence if they support a few facts referenced at different points in the the article. Despite being afforded less prominence than the Wikilinks, they remain much more usable than footnotes (or especially endnotes) in a book.

I'm also struggling to see how the Newslines implementation would be a better solution in the case of the Tom Hanks article referenced in your blog. I mean, would linking the word "immigrated" to a seven minute YouTube clip mostly not on the subject of Tom Hanks' ancestry reduce confusion? I think it would make it worse. The problem isn't the extra click, the problem is that the source is a fraction of a seven minute chatshow clip.

I agree with your points on timelines and data, but in fairness Wikipedia isn't and shouldn't try to be the whole internet. People who have the programming/UX skills to a specific subset of content appropriate form and functionality are always going to be a step ahead of random strangers tweaking text.

We use a footnoting system to reference books, although with increasing digitization this should be less necessary. As for the Tom Hanks example, you're right, that should include the YouTube "start time" parameter to link directly to the exact time he talks about his ancestry. Adding that parameter shows another advantage of direct linking -- that it can go deep into a video source.

I don't agree that the footnotes system is good for the reader or editor, because it obfuscates the link between the text and the source. It is very easy to add biased information to any wiki page. Let's say someone writes "Donald Trump calls McCain a war hero" but the reader thinks, "Hmm that's not what I heard". On Wikipedia they have to go to the footnotes and then click through, losing track of where they were at on the main article. How many people will do that? Not many. So the reader gets misinformation, and loses trust in the site, and the bias remains.

Instead if a link direct to the video is added then the person will know straight away. Even better if the video is embedded directly, but that's another story.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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://..." queries, but standard HTML links don't reference document fragments.)

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... . :)

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

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.

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.]

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.

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

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.

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