What do we mean by ‘Link Language’?
Here is my understanding of it. With the advent of the internet, being able to link things together and such, we started to have a lot of power to connect ideas. To do so, people had to learn HTML – which feels a little complicated – for a link this is what you did:
Yuck, right?
When Ward Cunningham thought about how to link pages together in a wiki, he decided that writing was more important than ‘coding’ – so he made it easy to link, in fact less keystrokes to create a link, simply by putting two or more capitalized letters together.
So page naming becomes important – the idea of a ThoughtChunk – something I learned from Brandon Sanders – what is the essence of the idea, how do we name it?
I am excited about CamelCase for LinkLanguage because I think that if you visualize that the digital world can be represented in the physical world (print, tv, etc) – we can start building our language by intention instead of pure individual chaos.
To attempt to illustrate the point: I turn to the new Terminator movie coming out on May 22, 2009 (aside- does anyone know how it relates to the current television series? /aside)
Looking at the marketing materials for the movie I noticed an array of ways they are showing off their own ‘ThoughtChunk’. Look at the www. website in these three examples and you will see their own marketing department struggle and learn about LinkLanguage:
1) From incomprehensibly hard to read:
2) Starting to use CamelCase:
3) To one of the best ways I have seen LinkLanguage used in a website name:
For my own personal satisfaction, to see what other people think: I turn to the lovely glow of Google, the first hit:
You can find the marketing materials on the beautiful, but hard to navigate flash website:
{ 2 comments }
I really enjoyed this article, it made a lot of sense. Coming from a marketing background I find it interesting how something like CamelCase not only makes sense on a coding level but on an advertising and marketing level as well. As mentioned in the article the capitalized web address not only looks bad but I’d be willing to bet the retention goes down as well. Retention in marketing is key; it not only makes CamelCase and LinkLanguage make sense but profitable and impactful as well.
Quite a good read this was, I agree with everthing you have said here.
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