It’s Time to Rethink the Link — Medium

"Today the ideas we care about are increasingly pieced together on the web – bound not in the pages of books, but in the links between essays, articles, blog posts, tweets, and clips that we create every day. Links play a central role in how we understand information on the web, but surprisingly there is no central, public repository of them. Instead, a small group of companies – who profit from what we click – are responsible for finding links on the web, storing them privately, and deciding what to surface when we search and read. These private companies now control how information is accessed on the web, giving them the power to influence what we see, how we feel, and even who we vote for. And this dangerous reality gets worse every day as the web explodes in size, and we become increasingly dependent on these companies to tell us what matters. It’s time to rethink how the web is connected, and to create a new kind of public library for linked knowledge ... When we search Google, we’re not actually searching the web – we’re searching the part of the web that Google has been able to find and index. There is no central repository of webpages on the Internet, so Google and others have created massive armies of crawlers, computer programs that hop from link to link, scanning for new webpages and storing them in Google’s private database of the web ... Google and others depend on us to link content in articles, photo captions, tweets, and navigation bars to power their search and recommendation engines. But all of that accumulated information that we create and that Google captures is kept in private, only accessible via Google’s search box, and restricted to what Google decides we should see ... At Wayfinder we’ve spent the past few years thinking about how linking and knowledge exploration on the web could work. We’ve studied the original proposals for linking on the web, and built new tools that enable anyone topublicly link content they find in a simple way. What’s special about this is that now curious readers – not just authors – can easily map knowledge and have a say in how the web is connected, without the burden of writing yet another piece of content. And as these tools lower the barrier to connect information, they’re being used to voice opinions, share inspiration, andexplain ideas in a handful of languages around the world ... To do so we’re building a new open database and API – a public library – that developers can access to create, augment, and query for webpages and their related links ..."