Hyperwords - Every word a hyperlink
The website
Liquidinformation.org.
was created by Frode Hegland, a researcher at University College London
Interaction Center, working with Mikhail Seliverstov, a programmer in
Russia. Their goal is to turn every single word of every online text into a
hyperword, a word you can click and then Google, look up in a dictionary, or
do any number of other things with.
So instead of
only a small number of links in a document, every single word becomes a
link. Further, every link can point to more than one place, pulling up all
kinds of background context from the web as a whole.
Technically,
Hyperwords Menu is - according to Liquidinformation.org - a pop-up
human-computer-interface element which is automatically added to the
requested document by the server, to initially, give more functionality to
blogs, and later to web pages in general. The reader just points to a word
and the Hyperwords Menu comes up.
See for
yourself how it works: The
project offers
basic demos: a live version of the
CNN website
and the
BBC website,
where hovering over any word causes a context-sensitive menu to appear.
-
February 10, 2005: Boxer, Sarah,
A Trail Leads to a Tangent of a Tangent, of a Tangent, New York
Times:
"Imagine
a world where every word of every online article leads you directly to
everything you did and didn't want to know about that word. That is the
plan at liquidinformation.org."
-
January 25, 2005: Walsh, Jason,
Information Wants to be Liquid, Wired:
"The web as we know it was invented by a British academic working in
Switzerland. Is a Nordic academic working in Britain about to redefine
it forever?"
Liquid
Information Research Projects