Monday, October 28, 2013

Jones and Hafner Chapter 3

I found it very interesting how the term, “hypertext” came to be. Theodor H. Nelson coined this term in the 1960s which I found neat because it always was just a word that meant linking to another source. When I use hyperlinks within my text, I want the information to be relateable to my reader and have them get some information from what they are clicking on, that I couldn't relay to them, or that wasn't my information to begin with.
I also really liked the description of the three structures there are for internal linking, and what internal linking is. I always wondered why on Wikipedia they linked from the top of the page to the bottom, and if it was actually considered linking. Now I know that this is a creative structure that helps the reader get down to the information he/she actually really wants! When I am reading Wikipedia and I want to know what movies a certain actor was in, I can click history or whatever, and it brings me there without scrolling for a few minutes and wasting my time.
Essentially, hyperlinks were created for just that reason – not to waste our time… to get us in and out as fast as possible! I have also seen the links to the next page within a website. These all give me ideas for how to create a website or blog with specific links to help my readers easily navigate and surf my pages.
I did a ton of linking in my recent informational piece about health. This reading showed me that it is okay to do this, within reason. I think that I did a good job linking to correct sources that will help my reader, but I don’t know if I linked to too many websites for my reader to stay focused on my words. They talk about in the text that more often than not, readers forget to explain what the reasoning behind the link is and I think that is what I mainly got from this chapter (besides all of the other major points) , so that is what I decided to focus on.

Overall, I think this was a neat chapter, sometimes repetitive but informative. I learned, as I said above to make sure I have an explanation of why I am linking to a certain webpage or image. 

1 comment:

  1. The book asked if hyperlinking makes us dumber because we read shorter bits of information, instead of, like you said wasting our time on things we don't need. Are you as tired of this question as I am? I have heard it my entire life. First it was TV, then video games. Now the internet. According to them I shouldn't be able to process a 1000 page book. And I can. Wanna have a discussion of economic meaning in Don Quixote?

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