"Begging for a hyperlink"

an idea for a communal contextualization protocol

published on 9.02.24

I've had a noteworthy experience as a writer and reader, which I think others have probably had too. It's the feeling that a specific sentence, in an essay or blogpost, is "begging for a hyperlink".

When I am writing a blog post or essay, the feeling is almost one of certainty. The knowledge that a specific sentence in a piece is referencing greater context or a lineage or canon I have encountered previously. The internet is great at this, building little bridges to different towns of culture. I often know a phrase or sentence needs a bridge to another town I've visited (or frequent) before knowing which specific bridge would work best. Example: I write a sentence like "a system for communal computing" and know there is a super cool previous essay or website or blog post I can link to with that phrase, even before deciding it should be a Spencer Chang post for instance.

As the author of an internet document, building the bridge is simple: I simply need to decide which pre-existing site or post works best as the entry point to the larger context my sentence is referencing and then add it as a link.

But as a reader of an essay, website, or blog post it is much trickier when a sentence is "begging for a hyperlink". Firstly, the feeling is different. It's almost like the sentence I just read feels like an invitation, a threshold of some unseen portal, but isn't actually a portal. I look to see if there is a hyperlink, or footnote, but there isn't. And it's a bummer! Like a promise of an exciting new plot in a work of fiction, never realized. And I can't do anything except go out Googling for gold. Doing my own portal discovery, my own research. This is mostly fine, but who knows if I found the best portal associated with the initial invitation? I will never know if the author was thinking of some different, more comprehensive or niche, context when they wrote it. And! The next reader who feels the same call to adventure I did when reading the sentence has no portal either, and is forced to go out Goolging too.

I'd like to "suggest a hyperlink" when I encounter these sentences out in the wild. I'd like to see the suggested links of other internet explorers when I read a post too. I'd like us all to work together to contextualize the web.

The implementation could vary, but it would follow this basic structure:

• A reader of a certain blog post sees a sentence which they believe could benefit from a specific hyperlink they have in mind to a blog post they read a year ago exploring similiar ideas.
• They highlight the sentence, and in the context menu click "Suggest a link".
• They add the link they were thinking of to the blog post from a year ago and include a brief description of why this link was suggested. They hit submit and keep reading in peace.
• The next visitor who comes to the blog post gets to the same sentence and sees a little post it note with the suggested link + description. They follow the link and are happy.
• Users can "turn off" suggested links if they don't want to see them while reading a particular page. Authors can "remove" suggested links they feel missed the mark.
• A given sentence would only display the "top suggested link" to not crowd up a page, but readers could go view all the suggested links for a sentence in a separate tab and contribute "a vote" to the one they felt best added to the sentence.

To end this post I want to be clear that I am not thinking of this as a "Truth Seeking" excercise. This isn't meant to be like a crowdsourced Wiki where we all constantly ask each other "source?" This isn't a distributed "Community Notes" feature for the entire internet. This is about building The Canon. Helping situate ideas in their idea families, not in pursuit of Truth per se, but rather Context and Lineage.

Proof of concept demo