Not only here at reboot8 one constant quest, one drive, that unites the sphere of people here and elsewhere working with, building, using, thinking about or perusing Social Software is the quest for hyperlinks. Compare the way we display information nowadays to the web like it was 5 or 7 years ago. The wish and practice to have links relevant to the content (no matter whether they are placed within the content or at side or below) is a sort of uniting theme in many conversations, talks and writings. People think of linking this to that, creating MashUps that serve as Link Hub bringing together ressources around certain objects. To be more visible: list classifieds according to the geographical location. Organise bookmarks around concepts. And so on. We "enhance" every interface with many many links, in some cases links themselves are the main content.

To me this is really a slow but steady walk towards some sort of global information network, that allows to add any ressource and tie the ressource to an object. This is not limited, but certainly more prominent, in the online world. Services like ThingLink and efforts to "tag" the real world with RFID or other NFC technologies works on bridging the gap between real and virtual worlds. Matt Webb had an interesting talk this morning about a next generation "Web" Browser, that could cope with the fact, that browsing the web might soon include more than just webpages.

It seems like we are on a crusade in the name of the hyperlink.

If any of you read this post so far, then it is clear what conclusion I have to draw at this point. We we are working on the Semantic Web vision. Really. We do not explicitly, but implicitly. Yet hardly anybody thinks of "typing" links to apply some sort of semantics to the connections and the ressources / objects. But I'm sure that this is on its way. Just a matter of time.