Projects to add "backlinks" to the web:
by Robin Hanson
This list began from one compiled by Chris Peterson at Foresight
More lists can be found at WWW
Collaboration and Annotation
systems
NCSA Annotation Proposal
Each server must respond to a "annotations" request with the name of a
server which answers requests for annotations. To add an
annotation, send it to this server, which decides whether "the user is
allowed to do so". An annotation includes a password for approving
changes.
John
Walker's "HackLinks"
Includes design constraints: "No browser/server changes", "Keep it
simple" and "Backlinks enabled on a document-by-document
basis" (i.e., at the document author's discression).
The plan last I heard was that John will code this design during
September '95. At the moment I see a ` plea for funds for
this project.
Low-rent Backlinks
Proposal to extend one or more of the big Web databases, to allow
searches on the HREFs of anchors--searches on the actual literal
pathnames which address the anchor target.
Hanson's Find Critics Asks what is
needed, at minimum, to make it easy to find criticisms of web documents.
HyperNews
(
see also)
can create a list of comments at the end of a Web page.
CoNote
You have to be authorized, relative to a group of people who share
documents, to read or to add annotations to a document.
Public Annotations
Wants Mosaic modifications to support.
Annotations to be stored in an "annotations" subdirectory of each
users' "public_html" directory next to where of user who had document.
Shodouka
Ka-Ping Yee wrote code that fetches the URL at the other end of an
incoming hit, and puts it in a list. The URL above takes you to this
list for his Shodouka page. This shows that it might be possible to
automate some parts of the collection of backlink information.
The status of each backlink may be:
- confirmed: the document was retrieved and did contain a backlink
- previous: the backlink has been confirmed in the past, but the most
recent retrieval failed (will try retrieving again later to confirm)
- potential: the backlink appeared in a referer log but the document
has not yet been retrieved successfully for verification
- expired: retrieval of this backlink has failed too many times
- removed: the backlink has been confirmed in the past, but the latest
successful retrieval showed that the link has been removed
Links are moved among these classifications according to the results of
attempts to retrieve the document containing each backlink.
Stanford's ComMentor
The architecture assumes the use of special browsers (or wrappers for
existing browsers), which might create a barrier to adoption. The
current proposal appears to be structured around a notion of
membership in a group as a basis for filtering/reading annotations.
Uses "Meta-information servers". Not a minimal proposal - bundled w/
lots of stuff.
Robin Hanson
August 28, 1995