Remembering CritLINK and CritSuite for shared-linking/tagging
March 5th, 2005
Nicholas Bentley said (emphasis added):
At a higher level I tend to see o.net as a ‘link container’, my brain as another, yours as another, etc. Fruitful communication between these containers seems to require a dynamic exchange not static mapping. How to achieve this dynamic ‘HTML’ I don’t know.
Am I straying off the topic? I don’t know.
Not off-topic at all, Nicholas.
In the mid-nineties, we were fans/users of the CRITLink system that, in many ways, implemented the people’s minds and on-line content as inter-linked link-containers model that you have described above.
With all the increased bandwidth we have these days, it is amazing that we don’t use more proxy server approaches to dynamically annotate on-line content. Proxy servers are a readily available technology to do the kind of link annotation and sharing that Nicholas describes.
During the boom-boom days of the Bubble, there were some commercial attempts to ‘tribalize’ dynamic tagging. Third Voice was probably the most memorable. As Big Money made the scene, intellectual property rights to on-line content got hot and third party tagging of others’ content found its way into the crosshairs, not unlike the stink over rappers sampling riffs from past hit records. (See Third Voice Trails Off…. for the backstory.)
The most prominent and now defunct non-commercial attempt to do ‘back-linking’ was by the Web Enhancement group at the Foresight Institute. The Foresight folks had a public domain (pre Open Source) project called CRITLink. The primary tech/though driver of this work was Ka-Ping Yee. Here’s a very interesting article, CritLink: Advanced Hyperlinks Enable Public Annotation on the Web, that details CRITLink and compares it to other link annotating systems.
In the mid-nineties when there was a CRIT.org web site/community (the domain is now used by an Internet security company). Using the CRIT.org’s proxy server, folks could annotate and carry on comment-annotation conversations for any URL on the web! The idea was great, but we just didn’t have the bandwidth and horsepower of today. So the CRIT proxy servers were up and down a lot. It was really cool, however, when it worked.
Of course there wasn’t anything like the O.net going on at the time, mostly static web pages and mailing lists. It would be really cool to see if we could chase down a copy of CRITLink and get it going so we could test its utility for dynamically adding the inter-linked link container feature to O.net. The interesting thing is that as a proxy server we don’t have to change a thing at O.net, only point to it via the link-adding proxy.
In closing, there’s a Small World interconnection between Yee and Englebart and CRITLink and Augment. See these pics to make the connection.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
Entry Filed under: Various Other
Remembering CritLINK and CritSuite for shared-linking/tagging
March 5th, 2005
Nicholas Bentley said (emphasis added):
At a higher level I tend to see o.net as a ‘link container’, my brain as another, yours as another, etc. Fruitful communication between these containers seems to require a dynamic exchange not static mapping. How to achieve this dynamic ‘HTML’ I don’t know.
Am I straying off the topic? I don’t know.
Not off-topic at all, Nicholas.
In the mid-nineties, we were fans/users of the CRITLink system that, in many ways, implemented the people’s minds and on-line content as inter-linked link-containers model that you have described above.
With all the increased bandwidth we have these days, it is amazing that we don’t use more proxy server approaches to dynamically annotate on-line content. Proxy servers are a readily available technology to do the kind of link annotation and sharing that Nicholas describes.
During the boom-boom days of the Bubble, there were some commercial attempts to ‘tribalize’ dynamic tagging. Third Voice was probably the most memorable. As Big Money made the scene, intellectual property rights to on-line content got hot and third party tagging of others’ content found its way into the crosshairs, not unlike the stink over rappers sampling riffs from past hit records. (See Third Voice Trails Off…. for the backstory.)
The most prominent and now defunct non-commercial attempt to do ‘back-linking’ was by the Web Enhancement group at the Foresight Institute. The Foresight folks had a public domain (pre Open Source) project called CRITLink. The primary tech/though driver of this work was Ka-Ping Yee. Here’s a very interesting article, CritLink: Advanced Hyperlinks Enable Public Annotation on the Web, that details CRITLink and compares it to other link annotating systems.
In the mid-nineties when there was a CRIT.org web site/community (the domain is now used by an Internet security company). Using the CRIT.org’s proxy server, folks could annotate and carry on comment-annotation conversations for any URL on the web! The idea was great, but we just didn’t have the bandwidth and horsepower of today. So the CRIT proxy servers were up and down a lot. It was really cool, however, when it worked.
Of course there wasn’t anything like the O.net going on at the time, mostly static web pages and mailing lists. It would be really cool to see if we could chase down a copy of CRITLink and get it going so we could test its utility for dynamically adding the inter-linked link container feature to O.net. The interesting thing is that as a proxy server we don’t have to change a thing at O.net, only point to it via the link-adding proxy.
In closing, there’s a Small World interconnection between Yee and Englebart and CRITLink and Augment. See these pics to make the connection.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
Entry Filed under: Various Other
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