Not in fact currently annotating anything. (A climbdown on my part, in other words! :-) )

The usages of the word "backlinks" I pounced on so gleefully were in fact perfectly legitimate (or at least borderline!), either referring to the concept in an extremely broad way or talking about things like Alta Vista's displaying of backlinks, which in and of themselves *really are* backlinks even by my pernickety standards - it's the act of displaying them that counts as forward linking in my sense. So now you know! :-)

"Backlinks" are forward links!

I'd like to make the case that the ordinary HTML anchor links we've been using for years deserve the title of "backlinks". The extraordinary new annotation links CritSuite gives us can then take their deserved title of forward links!

Consider a traditional printed journal article. At the end it usually has some references. These references existed at the time the author(s) wrote their paper - well, OK, subject to occasional bluffing! - and they reach backwards in time from the article.

If you want to find citations of the article, i.e. if you want to go forwards in time from it and see what people in its future say about it, you need to consult the Science Citation Index or a similar citations catalogue. This forward referencing service is highly prized and heavily used in scholarship. It represents the best effort of the world of the printed word to deliver the forward links scholars crave.

I'm sure you can see where this argument is leading. The ordinary HTML anchors we find in a web page are like the references at the end of a printed journal article. They were put there by the author(s); they reach back in time from the web page - again, subject to a bit of bluffing now and then - and they simply exist straightforwardly in the web page. They are backward (past-directed) links.

The achievement of CritSuite is analogous to that of the Science Citation Index and the like. CritSuite provides a look into the future - the future of the original web page that is! - by acting as a citations catalogue for the web. There is every reason to hope scholars will find this as much of a boon as they find printed citations catalogues. - Or more, since it keeps itself up to date in the way a paper document can't. In both the paper and online cases, these forward (future-directed) links or references have to be got at through an entity external to the article or web page respectively. (That entity is, of course, respectively the printed citation index or CritSuite.)

The punchline? Simply that, like the person who learns they've always been speaking prose, we can now recognize that we've been using backlinks all along. We simply didn't call them that because we had nothing to contrast them with. CritSuite provides the required contrast: true forward links for the first time.

This corner of the web maintained by [photo courtesy of the multimedia lab machines] Iain Stewart <ids@doc.ic.ac.uk>, Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK

Annotate the web - add your own comments to this web page or any other for all to see! (Only supported by some browsers, sometimes via an extension or the like.)

(If you're reading this from within IC DoC you can try Crit, an earlier way to annotate the web. Crit Me Now!)