Inky-Linky: making live links on printed webpages

Roo Reynolds's Inky-Linky is a bookmarklet that makes printed-out webpages much more useful by adding QR codes to the margins, corresponding to the links in the document. That way, you can follow the links in your hardcopy by scanning the codes. It's available as a tarball on GitHub, and will probably not be usable to you if you don't run a local web-server, but it points in a very interesting direction!

Inky-Linky

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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FoolishOwl

I don’t see the advantage of QR codes.

As I understand, they can be used to encode any arbitrary text string, but in practice, they’re nearly always used to encode URLs. But the related URL is generally printed adjacent to the QR code, anyway. And my smartphone can pretty reliably identify a URL if I get a photo of it; in addition, I can recognize the URL myself. The QR code is big, ugly, and redundant.
- http://twitter.com/brycas Bryce Castillo
  
  But if you’ve got a print-out that links to a long URL or doesn’t show the URL, you can use the QR to browse to the link on your phone. I think they’re not quite useful in a lot of situations with short, top-level domains, but this seems really practical.
Lexicat

Yeah, the innovation of the technology is not to produce followable links on a written page,[1] but to provide a way to track links followed from a written page without making identifying information humanly obvious.[2]

[1] http://www.url.com
[2] http://www.url.com/reg=a41b1Bfe39e
http://repeaterband.com skeletoncityrepeater

Not useful? I’m printing the Internet as we speak!
- ImmutableMichael
  
  Exactly. This is useful only as long as we see paper as a technology with a future beyond street poster art. This makes me feel the same way as photo printers – I just wonder why…
bruce_a14

I recall that for awhile back when programmers still lived in caves and rode dinosaurs, some computer magazines would print strips of QR-like static in the margin of their pages. When you scanned the strips (with a hand-held scanner, of course), it would enter the data for a BASIC program, saving you the trouble of retyping the complete program included in the article. (Because memory was so scarce and costly back then that programs were short, measured in bytes and maybe kilobytes, rather than megabytes and gigabytes.)
- Over the River
  
  This is the way I started using published code. Hand-held scanner from DAK Industries and an Apple IIc.
Symbiote

The “installation” doesn’t require anything much, simply follow the instructions on the Github page.
1) Go here
2) Drag the link to your bookmarks bar

To use it, visit a page and then click the link (it’s not a normal link, it’s a Javascript program).
Symbiote

It’s not difficult to “install”.

Go to the project page and drag the link to your bookmark’s toolbar. Click the link to run the script.
http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty

This would be ideal for when I print NTK on Friday to take home.
Also, Roo Reynolds does the wonderful podcast Shift Run Stop http://shiftrunstop.co.uk/
http://www.zhrodague.net/ Drew from Zhrodague

In ’02, I added Sema@codes:twitter (early printable barcodes for URLs) to my WiFiMaps.com project. Every page had one, so that if you printed it, you could call-up the same page by scanning the barcode. Perhaps I was a bit early, as there weren’t many scanning softwares for phones.