One-Way or Two-Way Links?


As is well known, the Web was conceptualized as a way to be able to share and access information in academic circles. Founder Tim Berners-Lee wanted it to go a step further, writes Walter Isaacson in Innovators. He didn’t want just a data management system; rather, he wanted a collaborative playground.

Ergo, Berners-Lee came up with the famous “hypertext”, those links when clicked take you to the other document or site, without worrying about which hardware or OS or anything else it ran on! Tech visionary, Ted Nelson, had visualized something similar in the 1960’s, except that Nelson wanted the links to be two-way for these reasons:
1)      It would allow navigation in both directions (linker to linkee and vice-versa);
2)     It would force links to be approved by both sides (linker and linkee). This provision would avoid the all too common problem we often face today: broken links;
3)     Lastly, it would allow for the future creation of a way to pay sites that were being linked to.

But Berners-Lee didn’t like two-way links. Why? He felt it would put constraints around linking, slow down the rate at which links got created, and ultimately slow down the growth of the Web itself. So the Web ended up with one-way links.

His choice led to the astronomical growth of the Web. But it has also resulted in a structure where aggregators (like Google and Facebook) make far, far more money than content creators (like media companies).

So why aren’t we now seeing a move to create two-way links with the provision to support micropayments to sites/articles that are being linked to? Aha, because it would need a central coordinator, and the idea of anything centralized is like poison to the Web…

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