Call me a nostalgist, but sometimes I like to plop my hoary frame down in front of the old desktop and surf the world wide web – the way we used to do back in the pre-Facebook days of my boyhood, when the internet was still tragically undermonetized. I was in fact on a little […]

In response to my earlier post on delinkification, and the ensuing discussion, the folks at Arc90 have rushed out a new version of their bookmarking tool, Readability. It includes a feature that will automatically convert links into footnotes on web pages. I have a feeling the software isn’t going to instigate a sweeping change in […]

The airing of the idea of delinkification did not, you’ll be relieved to know, set off a catastrophic implosion of the World Wide Web. It did, however, set a few minds to pondering. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum considered the distracting qualities of the link and their influence on our ability to pay […]

A few years back, my friend Steve Gillmor, the long-time technology writer and blogger, went on a crusade against the hyperlink. He stopped putting links into his posts and other online writings. I could never quite understand his motivation, and the whole effort struck me as quixotic and silly. I mean, wasn’t the hyperlink the […]