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No Longer No Sense of an Ending
This is my first feature piece on Contents Magazine, about harnessing the properties of hypertext and the Web for superior reader experiences and business results.
How I Write Alt-Text - 12 Aug 2026 03:30 UTC
‘Alt-text’ is short for alternative text, and is used to convey the substance of visual content as text. It is important for people with visual disabilities, though is beneficial for a wide range of people. It is useful for low-speed connections where an image might not load, for searching for an image, for SEO/AIO/GEO, for cases where a link to an image is broken, for understanding context, and for a variety of other gains.
An untitled post from Mar 2011
Posted on Thursday 17 Mar 2011. 1,130 words, 10 links. By Matt Webb.
Disaster, doubt, and the origins of hypertext
Hypertext and the World Wide Web are built on a complex network of ideas that originate in the military and ecological disasters of the short 20 th Century, 1914--1989, and in a world-spanning intellectual effort to prevent their recurrence. Though that effort now appears to have failed, and though the tragic story of the 20 th Century has not, it seems, concluded, we may learn profit by examining the concepts and ideals on which hypertext was built.
Disaster, doubt, and the origins of hypertext
Hypertext and the World Wide Web are built on a complex network of ideas that originate in the military and ecological disasters of the short 20 th Century, 1914--1989, and in a world-spanning intellectual effort to prevent their recurrence. Though that effort now appears to have failed, and though the tragic story of the 20 th Century has not, it seems, concluded, we may learn profit by examining the concepts and ideals on which hypertext was built.
poetic web: unfolding spiral
'poetic web: unfolding spiral' is a non-linear text I wrote as part of my bachelor thesis at the HFBK Hamburg. Driven by curiosity about the poetic web, the object of the text rather became the opening of a reflective space, where I could touch on the constraints and possibilities of language, words, worlds, and their artifacts, relation and meaning-making, smoothness, attention, and agency, and see how subtle shifts in understanding allowed for words to restructure and new meanings to grow.
Are.na Hypernormalisation
Pull images and text from are.na channels and combine them into a strangely familiar documentary critique of late capitalism. Good for full-screen ambient displays, or just staring into the void.
Vision and Reality of Hypertext and GUIs: 2.1.13 Microcosm @mprove
Microcosm (cf. 2.1.13) is a research project at the University of Southampton. Like Intermedia five years before, Microcosm is designed around the idea that material of diverse sources and formats should be tied together into one hypertext. To achieve this goal links have to be separated from the documents. They are stored and maintained in special link databases. In contrast to Intermedia, Microcosm plays the active role in gathering the necessary data out of the documents. For each topic it stores data on which documents contain information about it and also where inside the documents the information is located. This elaborated conception of links can be seen more as a kind of Memex’ trails than simple one-to-one links. Given this structure dynamic linking becomes possible. This means that links can be associated with generic text strings. Wherever this string shows up a link is placed automatically. This has the effect that documents that are imported for the first time into Microcosm can have links immediately.
The Future of Text
We are a community dedicated to working on how we can better develop text to augment our capabilities and we invite you to join us. We believe that the potential of richly interactive text to truly augment how we think & communicate is massive. Text after all, is externalized symbols we can interact with to extend our mind’s reach. Therefore text is not just a medium, it is also a tool for thought, and we are looking Beyond Visual Range.
Amelia Wattenberger 🪷 on Twitter / X
exploring ways we can "step back" from text/code and make sense of it,the way do in maps or how we can "fit more" in our visual system, it just gets smaller and decreases resolution.here's a fun one: extract the main concepts and throw them on a sphere, keep spinning to go… pic.twitter.com/yzh42EcBTe— Amelia Wattenberger 🪷 (@Wattenberger) July 6, 2026
Visionary lays into the web
Ted Nelson is a visionary who is credited with coining the term hypertext, but he is highly critical of what the internet has become.
What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished. The fragility of the Web poses an […]
A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Roadmapping
Wonderful maps and how to read them
social hypertext
http gave us hypertext. atproto gives us social hypertext.
A new app, HyperTexting, turns the open web into a scrollable social media-like feed | TechCrunch
marking off AI slop / seo spam pages experimenting with collective action on the whole internet
HTTP gave us hypertext, atproto gives us "social hypertext"
Building on some of @chrisshank.com's work, what if we had browsers that were atproto-native? orange link = in your PDS green link = in the…