This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
Links, Rechts
7:14 PM Tuesday, May 9, 2006
[Is linking only for losers?]
When I post to the Coffeeblog, I usually spend time picking words to link to other Coffeeblog items, to other general websites, or to social tagging websites such as del.icio.us. Linking is, frankly, a pain in the posterior, even though the Tinderbox software makes the process a little easier. I have thought, therefore, of bypassing the link process to make posting easier. My traffic software, which includes Sitemeter and MyBlogLog, tells me that very few readers bother to follow out-links anyhow. So why make the effort? To add insult to injury, Seth Goldstein the blogger asserts, in a long post about attention issues, that "Strong web bloggers no longer link."
This so offended hypertext mentor and Tinderbox developer Mark Bernstein, that he asserted that it is "literally ridiculous" to say what Goldstein said. Note that I made a link to Bernstein, who linked to Goldstein. If you have already clicked on my link to Bernstein, you are no longer reading this, your attention having already wandered. If that happened, one (Goldstein, to be exact) might believe that I am a "weak web blogger." This opens the door to two questions which are worth asking, and which you pathetic link-clicking bastards who are no longer reading this will probably never see, unless you come back to this post, in which case you are not a bastard but a patient seeker of enlightenment. The first of the aforementioned questions is: Just how strong should a web blogger be if a web blogger could be strong? Spending hours on Technorati has brought me no closer to the answer. Is Boing Boing the Charles Atlas of web blogging, under whose inspiration, any 9 or 7-link weakling can mold himself into a mighty behemoth of the blogosphere, who never again needs to fear getting sand kicked in his face when Technorati fails to pick up his latest link or reports that he lost one? If so, is linking only for losers, wusses, and wimps?
The second question, however, is yet more intriguing: Is there such a thing as Internet ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder: here's the link)? Do blog readers follow links to other sites because they are by nature impulsive, distractible, and perhaps hyperactive? Aha! I am going to morph that question into an even more interesting one: Is the Internet (hypertext, in particular) all about ADD? Are those hordes of anglophone schoolkids out there on Ritalin merely a preliminary stage of humankind's next evolutionary leap: Homo hypersapiens? Hmmm… Someone out there could get a doctorate comparing link-clicking behavior in geeks on or off Ritalin. I shall now restate the question in more familiar terms; pay attention: is ADD the harbinger of The Next Big Thing?
Go ahead, call me a web blogging wimp. You can't make me cry. Here are more links, more, do you hear, more: hypertext hypermedia links ADD creativity evolution Ritalin.
Art and images about: Hypertext Blogging
Permanent Link to This Entry | | | Technorati Tag: Hypertext
Copyright ©2004, 2005, 2006 Jonathan David Leavitt
