Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers! · brennan.day

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'The Sock Knitter' by Grace Cossington Smith. 1915. | Wikimedia Commons (edited by Julia Ritson)

Yesterday, Coyote wrote about the problems with Bubbles.town and more generally, feed aggregators that sort by popular vote. Coyote uses the metaphor of nature here—Bubbles being a “bioindicator for the local ecosystem” and its “popularity [telling] us about the state of things in its region of the blogosphere.”

Coyote isn't the first to reach for the natural world to describe how we read and write online. A decade earlier, Mike Caulfield described two competing modes of the web as the garden and the stream: the garden being the integrative, revisitable web of cross-linked ideas, the stream being the one-way, chronological rush of social media that vanishes the moment it passes you by. A few years after that, Tom Critchlow proposed a third mode to sit alongside them, the campfire—the smaller, cozier gathering of blogs-in-conversation, somewhere between the private and the broadcast. Coyote's bioindicator is in that lineage, not only describing the kind of space the web is, but what its current condition might be telling us about the region around it.

While I disagree with certain criticisms about the site, I do agree it’s important to figure out how to cultivate and sustain a healthy, thriving culture and community for the IndieWeb.

And this system is, plainly stated, a web. And a web becomes stronger and more durable the more interlinking threads and strands there are. In other words, when we link to each other in a way that meaningfully synthesizes, the web gets stronger and the ecosystem of the blogosphere improves. This is a solution that Coyote has written about previously:

Linking out to other blogs is the oldest way of making the blogosphere traversable. Not just blogrolls, button walls, and bookmarks, but link-rich text in the posts themselves as well, surfacing in feed readers and presenting long-time readers with new pathways to explore. If readers are not experiencing the blogs they follow as themselves a gateway to more blogs, then that's an indicator of a lack of link culture.

This touches on something important, and what I mean by meaningful synthesis. I know quite a few bloggers who do linkdumps—the act of sharing various links you’ve encountered over the past week. Sometimes, it's just the links themselves, other times there is at least a sentence or two by the collector with their own thoughts.

A blogger I read, Unstory, wrote briefly about writing that serves the writer, rather than the reader, and I think linkdumps are an example of this kind of writing (though they were talking more about post length, a little ironic since all I do is write long jeremiads like this).

What we need is "link-rich text in the posts themselves," to weave the thoughts of others with your own thoughts, and further enmesh the ideas from multiple people. Honestly, this doesn't need to be complex, it can be as simple as giving a shout-out or acknowledgements, as Melo did in her most recent blog post.

Really, I think writing longform posts that incorporate the works of others also does more benefit for the writer than a linkdump does as well. There are concepts from personal knowledge management about how there should be no orphan notes—notes that lack links to any other notes.

“The decision where to place what in the file can involve a great deal of randomness as long as I add references linking the other options” (Luhmann, 1987, p. 143, quoted in Schmidt, 58)

—from Richard Griffith's Writing Slowly

Notes with no links are just a pile; a rough linked note beats a perfect orphan.

Similarly, Bob Doto wrote about how Matuschak's vocabulary relates to Luhmann's original method. The link itself carries meaning, and how it's embedded in a sentence explains why the two notes relate. Andy Matuschak also writes about how notes should be densely linked.

While these concepts are designed for personal knowledge management systems, it's clear how important they are for the public, personal sites of everyone.

On Metablogging

Another issue Coyote brings up is how Bubbles.town's userbase will disproportionately upvote posts about Bubbles itself, in other words, metablogging.

If we want to avoid the banal fields of metablogging, a great way to do that is by reading the work of others, as well as books and news and scholarly articles, or even watching films, or visiting museums or listening to music—the more exposure we have to art and good work is an important part to this. If you want to be interesting, surround yourself with interesting ideas.

It doesn't even need to be explicit pieces of culture—anything in the world has merit to write about if you have enough curiosity and...