The essence of hypertext is the interconnected-ness that we are able to create between ideas. Of course this isn't the place to examine that essence, since if I haven't done that by now, I'm doing something very wrong. Still, an examination of one more aspect of that essence is called for here.

On the whole the Boidem attempts to use hypertext as a means to achieve that branching out of ideas. But the word ideas suggests something meaningful or perhaps profound. Doing that can be nice, but we don't always have to link to the meaning of life. Often, the link can be playful, and more or less an end in itself. This suggests the possibly rococo aspect of the highly hypertextual web essay. Embellishment gets added to embellishment, decoration to decoration, until at some point we even find ourselves in danger of losing the forest for the trees. Many of the outside references that show up in the Boidem (often as links within titles) are of this nature. Much of the time they refer to song titles, connecting to the words to those songs, or, when available, recordings of them. At other times they may refer to books or movies. Sometimes they come from the common pool of popular culture, at others from my own personal experience and taste.

Go to: It's more than just words and links, you know, or
Go to: Trying to make some sense out of all this, or
Go to: An introduction to the extroduction, or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?) medium