Participatory creation of multidirectional links aided by the use of co-link technology
Discussions on democratic online participation, cooperation in digital communities and network openness have highlighted the communication processes through services such as chat rooms, forums and weblogs. We aim, however, to focus on the politics of hypertext. But, instead of solely focusing on the quantity of links offered for a multilinear reading, this research is dedicated to the possibility of participatory creation of links.
Until now, associative links on the Web were still unidirectional vectors, and link creation remained normally on the hands of who had access to the server, to the code and knew HTML. Facing these limitations, Alex Primo conceived and Ricardo Araújo programmed the technology of co-links (http://www.co-links.org), aiming to surpass that gap. This new service opens Web pages to the cooperative creation of multidirectional links. Co-links technology may then open hypertext to the participatory construction of a social memory on the Web, registering the mental associations made by the participants between that text and others read before. It is also suggested that this system could be of particular interest to educational projects: aiding cooperative processes, promoting group activity and collective writing.