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blue bits. red rocks.
Wednesday 30 July 2008

Links are more like sticks than like funnels. There are so many ways to use them that there are few prototypical uses. Perhaps the most prototypical is the Web page that links to another because it’s on a related topic. But that’s not much more prototypical than saying a stick is part of an old branch. In fact, it’s worse than that. There are so many different reasons one page refers to another: to dig further into the same topic, to explore the topic more broadly, to explore a topic that’s related but not the same, to see an example of a site that doesn’t understand the topic at all, to get further evidence that what the page says is right, to propitiate an acquaintance, to get paid for running an ad someone clicked on. There are as many ways to link as there are to use a stick. The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age

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