The essence of the Web is the link. We use it to navigate, discover, form communities and get rankings on search engines. But, each link carries much more behind it than what has generally been exposed.

zLinks is a client-side service provided as a simple plug-in to turbocharge your links. All links embedded in a blog post or its comments, or from within a content management system (CMS), gain immense powers to link to and display additional related data and information. zLinks thus becomes a jumping off point for additional exploration and learning.

Site authors merely install the free zLinks service plug-in and their users and readers gain the benefits thereafter. 

Why zLinks?

In the early days of the Web, links were used solely to visit specific Web pages or locations within those documents. Somewhat later, actions such as searching or purchasing items could be associated with a link. Most recently, with the emergence of the semantic Web, the very nature of the link has grown to include references to data.

Thus, links can fulfill three different purposes, in rough order of their emergence:

1. To visit Web pages and locations
2. To potentially take actions (say, buy or search), and
3. To retrieve data resources.

This new latter purpose is called linked data.

When you install the zLinks service, you can take advantage of all three of these link uses. Every link that you embed in your content -- or that users view when visiting your site -- becomes a rich springboard to all that the Internet offers.

The zLinks Popup Screen

Moving the mouse over the special zLinks icon at the end of an embedded link invokes a powerful popup dialog where these rich interlinkages can be tapped:

The zLinks popup is organized into potentially four sections:  

1. header, with links to FAQ and what is New;
2. direct link to the source link's Web page (if it is indeed a URL to a document and not an indirect reference to separate data) or other action-oriented URLs such as Amazon or search;
3. the author's annotations (if any have been made); and
4. additional related link resources.

This latter category is the rich entrance to further semantic Web resources and actions and other interlinked capabilities.  It can grow to be quite long.  

Because of this richness, there are a variety of zLinks icons that describe the type of resource (person, place, thing, etc.) and whether it is a standard outgoing reference (a subject within the content) or an incoming reference (or "backlink", which is akin to being the object in a subject - predicate - object triple).  A few of the 20 or so standard icons are shown above; site authors may also add their own for additional defined types.

These capabilities mean that your embedded links not only can have their ripples followed as they extend out from your content, but if others are referring to your content, those links too may also be listed.  Note the little back arrow that designates the 'incoming reference' category.

In many instances, a related link resource may take you to one of the Zitgist Linked Data Servers, where data analysis, additional information retrieval, plotting on maps, retrieval of pictures, and all other forms of semantic Web magic with RDF are performed.  

These results are then presented through specially formatted and structured reports, called templates such as this one based on FOAF information:

Note how picture, mapping and other information is automatically “meshed” with this FOAF file. From the Zitgist DataViewer, you can continue to explore still further links and relationships. In this manner, zLinks adds an entirely new dynamic dimension to the concept of ‘interlinking.’

zLinks Annotations

The zLinks popup also offers annotations.  You, as the site author, can create as many of these annotations as you'd like by simply clicking on the special zLinks icon associated with any link embedded in your content:

In this example, a previous annotation had been created and saved by clicking the Save button.  This earlier entry shows at the top of the dialog along with edit and delete icons.

The lower text box is where a new annotation is being written.  

Additionally, if you have chosen to share your annotations to the public -- one of zLinks' configuration options -- any link that has an annotation displays with a unique icon to users.

Annotations are also written to file and can become a part of the RDF associated with the site.

zLinks Plug-ins

zLinks is being developed for a variety of blogs and content management systems.  The first plug-in is for the open source WordPress blog software, versions 2.0 and above.  It may be downloaded from here.

Additional plug-ins are under development and will be announced as soon as available.  If you have requests for specific platforms, please let us know.