I spotted this on Richard Grant's blog, and it set me thinking about how comments about papers, web sites, etc. in blogs and wikis form a network of relationships.
Similar networks already exist for papers, through citation networks (i.e. "cited" by and "cites"), and of course web sites are part of the network of the WWW. However these are not directly useful in this case since hyperlinks are not bidirectional, but instead describe a relationship in a single direction ("link to"). While use of Google queries can find pages that link to a particular page, Google does not represent all of the pages on the web and the search results only represent a snapshot of the state of the pages it does index as last indexed. The use of trackbacks is one way to let a source know they are being referenced, but it tells them nothing about the context of the reference, and it requires either the software or the author to explictly send a notification.
Some of this touches on the realm of the semantic web, where all documents contain semantic markup, however the semantic web concepts require extra work from document authors so it isn't an appealing option for most people. And, as far as I am aware, it does not allow for relationships beyond those defined by the semantics themselves, although traditional hyperlinks would still be possible. Another problem is that the semantic web would produce relationships from the semantics applied, which would expand the network significantly, and possibly loose the conection to the original article.
Similar networks already exist for papers, through citation networks (i.e. "cited" by and "cites"), and of course web sites are part of the network of the WWW. However these are not directly useful in this case since hyperlinks are not bidirectional, but instead describe a relationship in a single direction ("link to"). While use of Google queries can find pages that link to a particular page, Google does not represent all of the pages on the web and the search results only represent a snapshot of the state of the pages it does index as last indexed. The use of trackbacks is one way to let a source know they are being referenced, but it tells them nothing about the context of the reference, and it requires either the software or the author to explictly send a notification.
Some of this touches on the realm of the semantic web, where all documents contain semantic markup, however the semantic web concepts require extra work from document authors so it isn't an appealing option for most people. And, as far as I am aware, it does not allow for relationships beyond those defined by the semantics themselves, although traditional hyperlinks would still be possible. Another problem is that the semantic web would produce relationships from the semantics applied, which would expand the network significantly, and possibly loose the conection to the original article.
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