π, the permanent internet-link
Initiating pop culture sequence. Please wait.
There is a record of how the first Permalink came about. Wikipedia says it came from Kottke, and the then Blogger guys—Matt Haughey, Paul Bausch, and Evan Williams.
Now, I am a great fan of the Permalink. Without permanent internet links—which is what Permalinks essentially are, there wouldn’t really have been a usable, linkable internet. Everyone would then link to the source’s homepage, and users would be left to struggle with the UI to figure out the article they cared to read about on a given website.
This post isn’t about Permalink as a function, it is pretty banal from what I’ve just said in the paragraph above. This post is about its symbolic representation.
Kottke preferred to add a graphical symbol similar to an equivalent sign, while Blogger and Movabletype used the word “Permalink” itself in their representation. Like the earlier manifestation of feed symbols, there is a clear incoherency in how people represent their permalinks. There are all kinds of them, most notably, the hash (#), the paragraph (¶), and the somewhat familiar star, and the infinity loop (∞).1
People moved on once they got the hang of the permalinks, and when page or post titles themselves became the equivalents. So today, it doesn’t matter if you have an icon or not, as long as you have a title with a link attached to it.
Symbolism is a choice of the individual of course, and I am a believer. They are in my Gods. They are in my conventions. They are in the organization I work for. Even feed has a symbol.2 For me, they are everywhere.
I have often used some of the popular graphic icons in the past. Recently, and after a bit of deliberation, I chose π as my permanent internet-link (Pi) symbol.34 It is an age old, respected mathematical icon, which represents irrationality and—in my personal opinion—is an apt representation of the internet and its permanent links.5
π is for posterity’s sake. And here’s hoping that when Martians, or Saturnians, or whoever come looking at our history, and get all confused about the math π and the permanent internet-link π, they’ll notice the correlation, and appreciate it upon reading this note.
- I have used some of these in the past myself. [←]
- On hindsight, I now wonder why we have a graphical symbol for representing feed, instead of a plain text symbol. [←]
- For posts that are generally displayed without titles. [←]
- It is a simple
πcode in HTML. [←] - And for personal reasons. [←]