[JERUSALEM, ISRAEL]
BrowseUp has launched the beta version of software which the company says fulfills the original vision of the World Wide Web by allowing anyone to add their own links from any Web page.
“Everyone can make links from pictures, pieces of text or from site to site. It is a collaborative tool, ” said the company’s chief technology officer, Nir Melamoud.
The browser plug-in, which is currently only available for Internet Explorer 5.0, adds a BrowseUp button to the toolbar. When users browsing upon a web page where they feel compelled to add a link to a relevant site, they highlight the particular word, image or just link the entire page and drag it to the site they wish to link to, open in another browser window.
A pop-up-window creates a one- or two-way link, and the user can add keywords for the benefit of others.
Users can also link to content that they have created: BrowseUp’s software includes a tool for publishing content on the Web and provides users with their own URL (the current version requires the text to be in HTML rather than text; a future release will perform the conversion to HTML automatically).
When other surfers who have also installed BrowseUp visit a web page, they click on “show links” and view all those links that have been added.
This is the way the Web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee, wanted the Web to be, said Melamoud. A place where a browser is also an editor; a web page is not static but ever-changing.
Won’t webmasters resent the alteration of their pages?
“So what if they don’t like it? The Internet is not built for the webmasters, it is built for users,” he said.
BrowseUp was established in November 1999 and has 21 employees in its Tel Aviv and New York offices.