Pilcrows And Flows: The Fragmentation Of Media In A Web Of Flow

A pilcrow is a typographic term for the paragraph marker that many publishers use, such as the New York Times. It looks like this: ‘¶’.

This has come into recent prominence since the NY Times has implemented anchors on every paragraph of its news stories, so that every paragraph has a distinct URL. To access the URL you can double tap the shift key when viewing a NY Times page in a browser, and pilcrows appear at the head of every paragraph, serving as the place to copy the paragraph specific URL.

This allows a simple way to direct someone to a specific paragraph in a news story, instead of qualifying a URL to the story’s page by saying ‘3/4ths down the page, he writes…’.

This techniques is also called Winerlinks by some in recognition of Dave Winer’s use of these anchors, and the NY Times is referring to them as Deep Links.

Here’s one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/technology/30jumo.html#p5

Or one that highlights a specific sentence in a specific paragraph:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/technology/30jumo.html#h5s2

I find it interesting that no one has considered this in terms of the adoption of stream-based social tools, where the use of URLs is increasingly not about navigation, but of fetching. Instead of clicking on a URL to a photo in my twitter stream, my Twitter client pulls the photo and resolves it in the context of my streaming application.

One of the principles of the web of flow is the fragmentation of older, page-based media into easily streamable bits. And for that to work, each fragment has to have a unique ID, which is exactly what deep links are all about.

So, clever Twitter tool developers will soon be implementing deep links, and hopefully so will content management systems.

So in a few weeks time, I might post this:

I think Krugman is dead on about the Irish http://sto.ly/eevbPT

where the shortened URL was based on a much more complex structure:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/26krugman.html#p2h3h4s2h5s1,3

And if you click on it you’d be taken to the NYTimes, which would resolve it like this:

And I would expect a hypothetical Twitter client, one that implements deep links, to show me something like this:

I think Krugman is dead on about the Irish http://sto.ly/eevbPT

O.K., these days it’s not the landlords, it’s the bankers — and they’re just impoverishing the populace, not eating it. But only a satirist — and one with a very savage pen — could do justice to what’s happening to Ireland now.

The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians. The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.

Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.

As we want to pull more context — to create deeper meaning — we can expect the URLs to get more and more sophisticated, representing much more than a physical address on the web, but instead emphasis, and contrast.

Bit.ly recently introduced bundles — collections of URLs bundled together. Combined with capabilities like deep links you can start to imagine very sophisticated ways to represent a collection of viewpoints on a contentious issue, for example, or a series of posts on a specific theme. It will require more tooling to help those that are curatorially minded to create these collations, or every to devise a complex deep URL like the one in my example above.

There’s a lot of moving parts: better CMS, like the NY Times has implemented; better Twitter (or other streaming media) clients, that would resolve these elaborate URLs effectively; and better tools for creating the complex URLs for curators.

But I bet it will all come together very quickly, indeed.

[disclosure: I am an advisor to Bit.ly, and have a financial stake in the company’s outcome.]