#SMOOC Day 6: Hyperlink / Trackback / RSS

At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up.

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He leads the World Wide Web Consortium, overseeing the Web's standards and development.

The power of this idea directly related to its simplicity and to the lack of central control.

"The art was to define the few basic, common rules of 'protocol' that would allow one computer to talk to another, in such a way that when all computers everywhere did it, the system would thrive, not break down. For the Web, those elements were in decreasing order of importance, universal resource identifiers (URIs), the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

"What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There was no central computer 'controlling' the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere that 'ran' the Web. The Web was not a physical 'thing' that existed in a certain 'place.' It was a 'space' in which information could exist." (p. 36)

Welcome to today’s program, Weaving the Web, featuring Tim Berners-Lee, innovator of the World Wide Web and noted author. As discussed in detail in his book, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim shares his views on censorship, privacy, keeping the Web decentralized, the commercialization of the Web, and the increasing power of software companies in the online world. He talks about what's missing from the Web, and acknowledges that the Web as it exists today is far from "done." Finally, he shares his dreams of making the Web a much more powerful means for collaboration amongst all people.

These Participant Materials have been designed to complement Tim’s presentation. Follow along and take notes. Learning is a mental activity that requires active engagement with the subject matter. To help you further understand basic premises of the Web and the issues surrounding it, suggested reinforcement post-presentation activities can be found on page 6.

In computing, a hyperlink (or link) is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. A software system for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext system, and to create a hyperlink is to hyperlink (or simply to link). A user following hyperlinks is said to navigate or browse the hypertext.

A hyperlink has an anchor, which is the location within a document from which the hyperlink can be followed; the document containing a hyperlink is known as its source document. For example, in an online reference work such as Wikipedia, many words and terms in the text are hyperlinked to definitions of those terms. Hyperlinks are often used to implement reference mechanisms, such as tables of contents, footnotes, bibliographies, indexes, letters and glossaries.

In some hypertext, hyperlinks can be bidirectional: they can be followed in two directions, so both ends act as anchors and as targets. More complex arrangements exist, such as many-to-many links.

The effect of following a hyperlink may vary with the hypertext system and may sometimes depend on the link itself; for instance, on the World Wide Web, most hyperlinks cause the target document to replace the document being displayed, but some are marked to cause the target document to open in a new window. Another possibility is transclusion, for which the link target is a document fragment that replaces the link anchor within the source document. Not only persons browsing the document follow hyperlinks; they may also be followed automatically by programs. A program that traverses the hypertext, following each hyperlink and gathering all the retrieved documents is known as a Web spider or crawler.

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.

The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions. Since the term has been coined, it has been referenced in a number of media and is also used to refer to the Internet.

Sites such as Technorati, BlogPulse, Tailrank, and BlogScope track the interconnections between bloggers. Taking advantage of hypertext links which act as markers for the subjects the bloggers are discussing, these sites can follow a piece of conversation as it moves from blog to blog. These also can help information researchers study how fast a meme spreads through the blogosphere, to determine which sites are the most important for gaining early recognition. Sites also exist to track specific blogospheres, such as those related by a certain genre, culture, subject matter or geopolitical location.

A trackback is one of three types of linkback methods for website authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to their articles. Some weblog software, such as SilverStripe, WordPress, Drupal, and Movable Type, supports automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of linkback.

The TrackBack specification was created by Six Apart, which first implemented it in its Movable Type blogging software in August 2002. The TrackBack has since been implemented in most other blogging tools. Six Apart started a working group in February 2006 to improve the Trackback protocol with the goal to eventually have it approved as an Internet standard by the IETF. One notable blogging service that does not support trackback is Blogger. Instead, Blogger provides "backlinks", which allow users to employ Google's search infrastructure to show links between blog entries.

RSS (originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

RSS feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favorite websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed's URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds. RSS allows users to avoid manually inspecting all of the websites they are interested in, and instead subscribe to websites such that all new content is pushed onto their browsers when it becomes available.

Yahoo! Pipes is a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. The application works by enabling users to "pipe" information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified (for example, filtering). A typical example is New York Times through Flickr, a pipe which takes The New York Times RSS feed and adds a photo from Flickr based on the keywords of each item. Other than the pipe edition page, the website has a documentation page and a discussion page.

Yahoo Pipes: how to web feeds aggragate

Movable Type is a weblog publishing system developed by the company Six Apart. It was publicly announced on September 3, 2001; version 1.0 was publicly released on October 8, 2001. On 12 December 2007, Movable Type was relicensed as free software under the GNU General Public License.The current version is 5.14.

Movable Type has several notable features, such as the ability to host multiple weblogs and standalone content pages, manage files, user roles, templates, tags, categories, and trackback links.

Movable Type is written in Perl, and supports storage of the weblog's content and associated data within MySQL natively. PostgreSQL and SQLite support was available prior to version 5, and can still be used via plug-ins.

Movable Type was originally named "Serge" after musician Serge Gainsbourg.The TrackBack feature was introduced in version 2.2, and has since been adopted by a number of other blog systems.

IFTTT is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement: if this then that.

This video demonstrates how to combine several RSS feeds into one aggregated feed and then share it anywhere.

Sign up for a free account at http://ifttt.com/

Transcript:
Hi everyone, Erik Sebellin-Ross from CMD here. I'm going to tell you about the first really awesome web tool I've seen this year.

I've seen a lot of stuff, it's been more of the same...this has some more of the sameyness but it's got a degree of customization that's really sweet. It's called "If this, then that." Ifttt.com

It's kind of a syndication tool so you can take content from Facebook and have it show up on Twitter. But it's more flexible than those other tools because you can publish to SMS, craigslist, send emails, whatever. Another cool feature is that you can choose to be discriminate about what content gets syndicated. so, just tweets with certain hashtags...I'll show ya.