Via

My DVD writer has an irritating habit of failing to actually write DVDs. If I decide I want to listen to some music, watch a video, play a game, or even access a media-heavy website, my writer has a tendency to both soak up enough memory that these activities are no longer entertaining and also crash Windows. So, while I'm burning DVDs, I generally end up browsing around various blogs. Today, I started at Coding Horror, recommended to me by a friend of mine*.

While there, I particularly enjoyed this article on blogging, which led me to this article on the same site, which led me to more articles elsewhere. Thank goodness for tabbed browsing. I now have between ten and twenty tabs open, all of which I intend to read. However, these tabs are spawning new ones as fast as I close them. That, after all, is what blogs are meant to do, link me to other relevant material that the writer thinks may be interesting or helpful. And there's no shortage of blog entries talking about blogging out there. The problem of how to deal with this content-virus, constantly tempting me onwards with more and more lists and analyses and constantly multiplying until I have so many tabs open I don't even know which way is back, is my problem.

The real reason I decided to write about this is that it is not entirely clear to me what the etiquette about linking to other sub-linked stories is. Clearly I should provide a link to the blog that led me to an interesting article, partly because the context of my finding a link is interesting, and partly because the linking article might have salient points of its own to make.

But then, what if I'm linking to an article that I have reached through seven or eight step journeys. What if I want to link to sever articles in that day's particular link-tree. What if I don't want to have to type out the address of every interesting page I went through. What if I want to encourage the reader to follow the different paths that I have followed, but don't want to list ten or fifteen urls which are already connected anyway.

What, I think, would be interesting, would be a way of presenting your link tree on a page, beside (or as part of) the link itself. Clearly if you have several links to different, unconnected pages, there would be several link trees, but instead of having to put 'via' next to each link and then reel off a list of other pages that the reader might want to visit, you could provide them with your link tree. I don't want to worry about the construction of this tree particularly at this moment, but it could be done by entering addresses manually into some sort of GUI, or by setting up an 'auto-track' mode, that tracks your movements and then lets you pick a section of this journey to display with the link.

What makes this idea more interesting to me is that if you reached an interesting link tree on someone else's blog, there is no need to worry about building your own to mimic his. Instead, you simply include his tree on your article. Another node is added automatically to represent his article at the top of the tree, and the rest of the tree already exists. Clearly you can trim and prune if you want to, to remove anything that appears irrelevant, but a reader of your article can immediately see that you have been to this other person's blog, and through them, on to other places. Writers who draw together interesting articles are automatically credited by the people who link to them in the future, and people can see at a glance the extent of an article's research and scope.

My interest in this idea is purely whimsical. I have no idea (but would be interested to hear) if there are huge practical or philosophical problems with the idea, or if there is a technology that allows you to do this. Equally, if there is not, I have no huge desire to push for it. It is simply something that occurred to me whenever I wrote the word 'via' after a link.


* a friend, in fact, registered as a writer on this blog. A writer in name only. Apparently.