PurpleSlurple making the Rounds

Matthew Schneider left me a comment on an entry the other day and helpfully logged his Blog as well. Now I'm a sucker for a good name so I checked out PurpleSlurple and came across a fascinating idea that takes a while to sink in. I still haven't got it all but there's an underlying intelligence here that makes me think something very interesting is up.

Update
One of the most interesting things about all this Purple Numbering/ Hash Marks/ Pilcrows stuff is the speed with which it is evolving as new, and damned smart people take up the idea, critique it, adopt, adapt and improve (Thank you Rotary) it. As the idea takes hold and many minds go to work on it, they are converging on a good model that will actually start work pretty soon. At which time I'll be hanging off the Typepad people to get with the programme.

Matt says:

PurpleSlurple is a transcoding service that reformats Web pages on-the-fly to create granular addressability in document elements on EXISTING Web pages.

PurpleSlurple transcodes Web pages by inserting anchor tags which appear as Purple Numbers, at each structural tag, that occurs on the page, thus making each element addressable via its named anchor.

PurpleSlurple is AVAILABLE TODAY for the MILLIONS OF DOCUMENTS that don't have granular addressability.

And behold, Tim Bray starts playing with it immediately, and refining the idea so that it is just as effective and less obtrusive.

ongoing Purple Number Signs

Until this weekend I'd never heard of "Purple Numbers" but they've been across the radar twice in the last day, first in some commentary by Chris Dent on the Atom-Identifier issue, then again over at Jonas Lusters place. First I thought, why not? Then, why numbers? [Updated: Backed 'em out for now, needs more work.] [Updated again: put 'em back.] #

The purple-numbers idea seems rooted here, where its description as "a makeshift solution to a relatively simple problem" immediately gave me a warm glow, because so is the Web. #

I look at these things and the idea of sticking a visible anchor on each paragraph to make it addressable seems like, well of course! In particular here at ongoing where I'm prone to write thirty-paragraph rambles with multiple allegedly-related arguments, it would make Mark Pilgrim's life so much easier if he could directly point at a paragraph that's particularly wrong. #

The more I think about this, the more it seems like every paragraph on the Web should have its own address. I also like the soft unobtrusive purple, #. But I don't like the numbers. #

If the link is visible so you can click on it to go there, or right-click on it to copy the hyperlink for pasting elsewhere, or drag it to another application if you have that kind of support, why do you need a distracting, otherwise-meaningless number? The appeals to node addressing and hierarchical addressing and Engelbart and Nelson leave me cold. #

So, on an experimental basis, I stitched 'em into the ongoing software, it took about fifteen minutes. Other people who do this use elaborate javascript hacks and have tricks to turn them off. Given the nice soft color and the fact that my Purple Numbers aren't numbers, I don't see the need to turn them off. Maybe in a print stylesheet, but I never got that to work anyhow. #

If, after a few days, I still like them, I'll republish the whole site and make every ongoing paragraph a first-class Web citizen. #

What I like about it most of all is that it doesn't try to deal with the content, it just creates an address for every paragraph of that content and leaves it up to people to make sense of it. Now, when Google searches the page, it will find the keywords for every paragraph and the keywords for the linking pages and start to make a finer grained web of meaning from the connections.

Apply that across an organisation's intranet and legacy system, then watch people start dealing with the documents from the inside out. When I do a search I'll be presented with a whole bunch of paragraphs that match the terms, if they look useful, I can open the document, but in any case, I can drag them into my assembler and create links to the originals while contributing a little personal Mojo to the author and the document.

Exit stage left, humming Mama Cass "Getting Better"

Update
I go 100% with Chris Dent who says

The linkability of content is a way of opening up the system to allow greater review, commentary and reuse. Tim's solution is reasonable (adding the links when there are sufficient granules in the document to warrant granular addressing) but leaves room for a later adopter to be less open.

This is why comments about granular linking reeking of ego struck me as way off base. PurpleNumbers and similar systems aren't there for the author. They are there for the reader, the responder, the critic.

Precisely so. The mockery and semi-angry behaviour attached to purple numbers or Pilcrows, is a sign that something very interesting is going on, people's ideas are being disrupted. That's the problem with an inherently disruptive technology, sometimes it upsets the cart and kicks the apples all over the place, my damned apples what's more.

Also see my response to Taka below

Comments

[Taka]

Um, I don't think everyone likes the idea:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/30/pink-numbers

:-)

[Earl Mardle]

Its very funny for sure, and well worth the visit.

Purple hash marks may not be the greatest implementation of the idea, although they are better than the numbers for sure, but they do enable other people to establish fairly fine grained connections to what I think are appropriately sized units of meaning, ie paragraphs.

They enable a search engine to bring together keywords and local context without making any claims about their value or importance or even their meaning, that is left to me, the observer.

In the academic citation model, we quote a sentence, maybe only a few words, then link to the whole page and the document. Purple Numbers enable that process to be hypertextual, works for me. And it enables me to work from the inside out, I can get to exactly what seems relevant in a document and accept or discard it, rather than having to start with the whole and rummage round for the parts.

Some form of this will work. I'm also interested in the comments on Mark's site which seem to be following the Ghandi trajectory.

"First they ignore you; then they mock you; then they punish you; then you win." We are already up to mocking, two steps to go.

[Chris Dent]

Very interesting comments, thank you. You've pretty much hit the big vision on the head.

This is something of a relief. It is also a relief that you recognize that this is a step on the way to something, something that's not fully defined, that will change as the journey progresses.

I hope the punishment for disrupting is not too dire for anti-authoritarians like ourselves.