Dave Winer is at it again, and if you’re an online author or publisher you’d better pay close attention. Winer has completely reworked his writing environment (when you’re a programmer you can do that) and, most interestingly, he’s exposing parts of it on the web. His writing has source code, Winer notes. “It’s always been this way, but I’ve accepted the limits of other blogging tools, and the limits of RSS, and not exposed the richer writing environment behind scripting.com. That is changing, gradually, with the new software.”
The most visible addition to Winer’s output are little plus signs, signifying a link to contextual information—something Winer calls sub-text. Click on the plus sign and contextual—or, more likely at this early date, conversational—content is revealed. Winer refers to this as an “internet-age footnote” and says it’s related to Nick Carr’s misguided article about it being time to get hypertext links out of our way.
Carr says hypertext links are a distraction. “Sometimes, they’re big distractions—we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read,” Carr writes. Uh, that’s what browser tabs are for, Nick. Carr goes on to state (without citation), “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.” Without a citation, statements like that are of little use. From the abstract of “Reading Strategies and Hypertext Comprehension” from the November 2005 issue of Discourse Processes: “The literature on assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension during the past 15 years has yielded contradictory results.” (In a prior life, in the pre-web world, I wrote three books on hypermedia; I tend to follow this area with some interest).
