Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!

Yesterday, Coyote wrote about the problems with Bubbles.town and more generally, feed aggregators that sort by popular vote. Coyote uses the metaphor of nature here—Bubbles being a “bioindicator for the local ecosystem” and its “popularity [telling] us about the state of things in its region of the blogosphere?” Coyote isn't the first to reach for the natural world to describe how we read and write online. A decade earlier, Mike Caulfield described two competing modes of the web as the garden and the stream: the garden being the integrative, revisitable web of cross-linked ideas, the stream being the one-way, chronological rush of social media that vanishes the moment it passes you by. A few years after that, Tom Critchlow proposed a third mode to sit alongside them, the campfire—the smaller, cozier gathering of blogs-in-conversation, somewhere between the private and the broadcast. Coyote's bioindicator is in that lineage, not only describing the kind of space the web is, but what…