Hyperlinks as Conversation

Hyperlinks are fine-grained, bidirectional, and extrinsic. Frequently, an argument is not with a document or chapter as a whole. It is with a particular point that someone made at a particular place in the text. For example, someone refers to the fourth law of thermodynamics, and someone else writes a criticism saying there is no fourth law of thermodynamics, linking it to the original. The fine-grained property allows the link to designate the particular piece of text with which one is takin...

 The Web is the Death of the Anecdote

Surveillance serves not just as a legal and historical record but as a record of rep: proof that you’ve done what you say you’ve done. You bark, and anyone on the mesh can search to see if you also bite. It’s the foundation of the reputation economy. It’s not just video, of course, but surveillance of all types. Ubiquitous, ever-present surveillance has become the new public record in countless habitats. You’ve seen the phrase, “Links or didn’t happen,” right? Without footage...

 The Net is a Playground of Entropy

It may be fun to surf the Net and follow things randomly, but there's value in structure. The Net is a playground of entropy--the structurelessness that occurs when energy dissipates from a system. Yes, the Net also fosters self-organization, when individuals apply their energy, selectng and filtering information for others (aided by search and filtering tools). But there's rarely uch internal structure to what's selected; the structures created by links are usually webs of cross-references r...

 The Importance of Web Topology

Web topology contains more complexity than simple linear chains. In this section, we will discuss attempts to measure the global structure of the Web, and how individual webpages fit into that context. Are there interesting representations that define or suggest important properties? For example, might it be possible to map knowledge on theWeb? Such a map might allow the possibility of understanding online communities, or to engage in 'plume tracing' - following a meme, or idea, or rumour, or...

 Compactness in Linked Hypertext

Global metrics look at extracting information about the graph as a whole. Compactness is a measure of how connected the graph is; a compact graph means that, in general, it is easy to reach a randomlychosen node from another. The usual measure has a range between 0 (totally disconnected nodes) and 1 (universal connections). Compactness of 0 is obviously hopeless for an information space, but perhaps less obviously the graph shouldn't be too compact either; if authors of webpages are sparing a...