Link to Disenchanted and some other sites on the Net, and they might display the address of your Web site–automatically. Check out Jon Udell‘s recent observations on the trend. You can even arrange for your comeback to be reachable via a popup when someone clicks on a reader-response link at the end of the paragraph on which you’re commenting. Cool. Talk about loops and all that. What’s more, the same system lets you, linking from outside, choose the paragraph where you want people to go within the target site.
Along the way Disenchanted has noted that Ted Nelson envisioned two-way links. Now they’re happening in real-life on the Web, which he reportedly has dismissed as just a quick-and-dirty alternative to the Xanadu approach.
Think about the implications here beyond the opportunities for site-to-site dialogue. Once links were kind of back-roomish, the stuff of Web logs, the old-fashioned variety, but now they not only drive Google ranks but are to be made public in real time. So what’s next? Will news sites–excluding the dinos at the Dallas News, of course–grade journalists by the number of sites linking back to individual articles? And what about the videos on the Net? Will Variety someday augment box-office take with link counts?
