Slashdot Mirror
Web Page Entanglement
jason continues:
"By viewing the web through a tangle proxy, you can see the connections and associations left by those who surfed the web before you. By surfing the web using tangle, you also leave behind connections and associations for others who will surf in the future.
When you exit one page and enter another (by clicking a link or performing a search), a two-way link is created between the pages. As users surf through a particular page over time, tangle keeps track of popular ways to get to the page and popular places to go next. These entry and exit links are displayed at the top of each page, sorted by popularity.
Clicking on one of these entry/exit links tells tangle that you think the link is relevant and useful (like a vote for the link) and increases the link's popularity. In other words, if a user thinks of something relevant while reading a page and performs a search for it from that page, tangle gauges how others react to that association over time.
tangle is similar in some ways to the closed-loop hypertext system Everything2, though tangle works for the web at large.
We have several tangle proxies up and running. The tangle proxy software is also available for download.
A note for the paranoid:
Though tangle keeps track of web usage patterns, the focus is not on tracking the habits of individual users, but on tracking the trends of an entire community of users. tangle is GPL'd open source [source here], so you can see for yourself: clicking a link through a tangle proxy simply bumps up the links popularity---user IP addresses are completely ignored."
It seems pretty poiintless to me...
What?!? Pointless? Think of how the porn industry can apply this technology...
How long before this goes the way of the search engines with people abusing this to promote their own links?
It sounds cool, but might prove to be useless... the phenomenon will happen that popular sites will be the ones getting the most hits and just perpetuating that way just because they are popular. More useful but less popular sites will be overlooked because they haven't been looked at much.
As with competition in business, you can vote it down by simply going somewhere else.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Excluding mutually authenticated ssl sessions, when have you ever trusted anything online?
There's 15 routers between you and any web page you're visiting. That page is transmitted in plaintext the whole way. A man-in-the-middle attack could easily filter/scrub/change/subvert any page you're viewing.
I know paranoia's popular on slashdot about how "The Man" is going to censor your viewing habits, but if you think that this is some sort of new problem created by proxies... just look at how TCP/IP operates. And smack yourself for not thinking that it already could happen. This is not a new concept or a new danger.
Take-away message: if you need to ensure your data's passing along the net securely... use a secure transport mechanism.
put links on your web pages based on what the web page is about
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
You don't, and you don't really have a right to. People can view your content through whatever proxy or filter they want if you put it online at a publically accessible URL. You as a content producer don't get to specify exact presentation.
This is like the concept of node links at the bottom of everything2 nodes, isn't it? It's a neat idea, but it's easily abused (as seen by the goatse posts above). It can make surfing fun, though. I often spend hours at everything2 following links I find interesting.
if(!cool) exit(-1);
1. Server load.
2. Limited feedback. Would be much more interesting as a tool for discovery if users could grade their findings. Presumably annotation would allow memos to be posted.
3a. Privacy concerns, i.e. this would seem to provide more transparency to crowds. And Slashdotters might become more predictable. (Nah!)
3b. Privacy concerns II. By announcing statistics of aggregate use it might be possible for a repressive regime (China, Scientology) to gain ammunition against individual websites by being able to prove how many visitors they had and (by purchasing an advertisement on an associated server like yahoo) what their IP addresses and demographic profile are (as impled by 3a above). ActiveX or Javascript exploits may also target heavy traffic streams with relatively little effort.
4. Confusing intent. Adding visible backlinks seems quite valuable. However the client still cannot look more than one ply above its current location in what is still an undirected tangle. Is the tangle team (nice name by the way) aware of the large body of work already accomplished in annotation, syntactic web, Xanadu, etc.? What pressures exist to get people to take the less-travelled routes, or is the purpose to increase the traffic of popular sites? In that case are annotations superfluous? More docs please.
5. (?) a bug in slash they note.
If I'm way off, thats because I'm too damned lazy to read the article.
From my experience, this would be a horrible thing for tech support databases.
As it is, most major tech support sites already rank and display information based on how many people have already accessed it, informed them of usefullness, etc.
Invariably, when I visit vendor tech support pages looking for information, I am looking for some of the most obscure problems. And I have a hell of a time finding the information that I need, because I'm not looking for the 'popular' stuff. And if I ever do find what I need, I better bookmark it or print it, because if I come back later, there's no way I'm ever going to find it again.
I'd rather have a plain, simple, boolean word search engine over an 'intelligent' support database any day.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Ok, maybe I didn't explain my thoughts well enough, which I know is prone to happen.
The analogy is as follows: Nodes in the traveling salesman algorithm are akin to a ring of popular related websites. Traveling Salesman wants to find a way to minimize the distance required to travel to each node. Web Page Entanglement(WPE) wants to find a way to minimize the number of direct links (paths) between somehow related popular nodes.
"Ants" work by testing each link, mostly following the shortest known path, but sometimes branch out to see if there is a shorter unknown path.
WPE is similar because if users from a go to b, and users from b goto c, then naturally there will be some that go directly from a to c, which will rise to be a popular link, and thus a's links are more "optimized" to link to other popular somehow related websites.
I find the similarities quite apparent. Perhaps you should open your mind and realize that they are quite possibly not ~100% unrelated. Besides none of the other replies to this thread have sided with you.
I would like to hear from anybody that does side with mosch, because I may be wrong and I think it is a virture to assume that one is not correct. A virtue more people should adhere to.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
You probably also think that book-authors have a right to decide how you read their book (only 1 chapter per day, and then discuss it with at least 10 friends afterwards), or movie-producers how you watch their movie (ONLY in expensive THX-enabled theatres in the capitals of the world for instance), and NEVER in a home.
You are right, you CAN say how your information should be provided, but people don't have to listen to you..
"Right"? Bah! Rights are for 3-year olds on an ego-trip.