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What's the coolest thing about the Internet? Ask ten people and you're likely to get ten different answers. But I bet almost everyone would put the ability to hypertext, or "link," somewhere in their top five (I'd actually put it at number 2, just below the ability to Google, but hey, I'm the guy who writes the Tuesday Turnip, so maybe that's just me.)

So what could replace the text link one day very soon? Well, how about a video link! The Economist reports that hypervideo, or clickable areas in a video that take you to related videos, is just around the corner.

From the article:

As the amount of video available online increases, so do the possibilities for linking clips together. Someone watching a documentary about the 20th century, for example, could click on the face of John F. Kennedy and be directed to newsreel footage of him. Further clicks might lead to the trailer for "Thirteen Days", a film about the Cuban missile crisis, to an interview with protagonist-actor Bruce Greenwood, and to a film promoting tourism in Hollywood. Just as hyperlinking disrupts the traditional structures of written text, the same is true of video.

The question remains, though: how do you know JFK's head is "clickable?" Well, apparently the new technology will allow editors to add highlights, the same way we do here at the _floss, with text. There might also be beeps, or audible cues, which, I guess will signal a whole new category of multitasking: hearing and processing two different sounds simultaneously.

Talk about keeping up with the 3-little-boneses...

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September 27, 2006 - 3:31am
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