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Menachem's Writings It's all in the links Links are the fuel of the Internet. The World Wide Web is called a web because sites, information and pictures are so very linked and interlinked. And the number of links to any site reflects popularity . We have just set up two new sites to exploit these interrelations. These two sites themselves, I believe, are very interesting conceptually and will provide some interesting research data on the psychology of the Web. The ideas stem from my interest in Linguistics. The aim of the two sites is to weave two different tapestries of the Internet allowing all internet users to take part in building the sites. The first site, Many Words, explores the use of language on the World Wide Web. We are facilitating the building of a new, on-line, dictionary of the words in use on the Web -- the words people use to describe Internet sites. People can choose the word that best represents their site and we will link this word to the site. Any single word will appear only one time in our dictionary. Words in our reference work can be in any language -- abbreviations and misspellings are valid because that's the reality of Language today, driven by our addiction to our browsers. It will be interesting to see how homonyms and homophones are resolved. There are other linguistic and semantic questions that we will be able ask as we build data. The second project, Logo Quilt, weaves the tapestry graphically rather than by orthography. Our Internet Quilt is being stitched from patches that are logos or other graphic representations of sites. Each image in the Quilt represents a site. (As the logo is sited outside of our site, each patch in the Quilt results in two Internet relationships.)
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