The silence of the link
Jill has implemented a feature on her site which makes visible the 10 last referrers to her site. A colleague has objected to it, thinking that she is showing off. I dont think so - I really like the idea since it is just making visible something that quite a few of us with a sitemeter practice anyway: looking at those who look at us ;). However, I do not agree with you, Jill, that this visualisation in a significant way changes the power structures of the Web. To really contest the ownership of the link, and thereby the authoritatíve relation between it and you as the recipient of it, you would have to be given the option of actually taking it over, by erasing it, changing it or commenting on it instantly. In fact, the referrer link-list as it is now displays all the people who looks at your site, disregarding whether you wanted them to look at it or not. Which means that all those that look at my site for the wrong reasons (those who do not come looking for Lisbeth, but for Bondage b a r b i e or children p l a y i n g naked) would be featured at my site. Which is similar to letting a lot of strangers into my living room without knowing the reason why they want to visit me. Surely I can look back at them, but they were here first whether I want them to trespass or not! And our respective identities and motives remain uncontested, uncommented.

What I think would be a truly interesting experiment would be to combine this feature with the Odigo programme. Odigo is a free "portable" chat feature, a kind of "remote control device" which you can have running in a window while you browse. It shows you the other people who are online looking at the same site at the same time as you (provided they have registered with Odigo too). So if you have Odigo running and can see that the most recent visitor to your site is, for instance, Jill and if Jill were using Odigo too, I could actually interact with her immediately and engage in a dialogue about the post she is presumably looking at. In this way, the link would no longer be silent - via Odigo it would be given the voice of its sender - and I would be able to find out why it had appeared on my site - what made its "owner" go there. And isn't that what is really interesting about the link? Not that it is there per se, but why it is there and in which way my voice made it come?

# posted by Lisbeth at: 21:46