Multi-linking turns ordinary URLs into next-generation URLs. Today’s URL links only to a single page on the Web, assuming the link is still viable at all and has not become obsolete. But a multi-link pops up a menu of links that take the user directly to wherever the user wants to go. The menu is created and controlled centrally by the publisher, no matter where it appears on the Web – the publisher’s site, its online partners’ sites, even within PDFs and other downloaded documents – but the user selects where to go. The result is a win/win for both publisher and user, where the publisher creates the navigation framework (e.g. links to related content, related products, purchasing opportunities, etc.), but the user gets to drive.
This creates a new paradigm of Web navigation – from “Go search for it” to “Here it is.” Unlike today’s Web navigation, where users go hunting through a labyrinth of Web pages – and where each successive click represents a delay, risks a wrong turn or a dead end, creates frustration, and loses sales – multi-linking brings the user directly to wherever they want to go in a single click.
Content Directions, Inc. (CDI), now re-branded Linkstorm Corporation, was the first company to pioneer this feature of the Handle System, which is the new linking standard for the Web created by Internet inventor Dr. Robert Kahn. The Handle System is not only the platform underlying linkstorms ™ , which also utilise a series of patent-pending extensions to the Handle Systems which have been in commercial production from CDI/Linkstorm since 2001; it is also the underlying platform for the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which currently interlinks 99% of the world’s STM Journal literature, though via single-linking footnote links, not via multi-linking. The Handle System is also used by the Library of Congress and various DoD organizations, and is maintained by Dr. Kahn’s US gov’t-funded research organization CNRI as a platform for the next-generation Internet.
