MUDGE’S Musings
Had this thought yesterday.
Any of you regular reader of this nanocorner of the blogosphere are aware that MUDGE often is slightly link-crazy.
I believe I learned this style best from one of my most regular reads, Slate.com, and good teachers they’ve been.
What linking does for yours truly, and here comes that flash of insight –drum-roll please — linking sequiturizes.
We all think we know what a non sequitur is. My new toy WordWeb says that it’s “A reply that has no relevance to what preceded it.”
So, when MUDGE pops out a comment, like this one from a recent posting…
An ambitious plan, to be executed of course by the lowest bidder.
… you don’t have to be in the dark about what I might mean by that.
Because I’ve provided a handy hyperlink to let you know exactly what I had in mind.
Wikipedia’s article goes a bit into the history of the hyperlink:
The term “hyperlink” was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by “As We May Think,” a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a “trail” of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.
Ted Nelson was a genius — I remember reading him in the fondly remembered Byte Magazine (I was a near-charter subscriber, of course), and thinking “this man is a way out futurist.”
So, the non sequiturs will keep on coming, gang, sequiturized (must be the process of negating a non sequitur, right), by Ted Nelson’s (and of course Tim Berners-Lee‘s) marvelous hyperlinks.
New motto for this nanocorner:
It’s it for now. Thanks,
–MUDGE
Posted by mudge 
Left-handed Complement 