Webbing and Link Hopping

From my brief digging through a few google searches, it looks like the most extensive fan sites for the Ender Universe are philoticweb.net and ender'sansible.com. The sites have some sort of partnership going on, but I like the design of Ender's Ansible better, so I'm going to use that one for this post.

This site has links to the following categories of sites:

• Commercial websites selling various products.
• Examples: game shops, movie prop stores, Amazon, and book stores/presses
• These sites are not focused on the Enderverse. They are probably the least related if the entire site is being analyzed, but they sell products related to movies and books, and they have content on their sites related to my topic.
• Other fansites
• Example: philoticweb.net
• This site is another one directly focused on the Ender's Game universe.
• Author and Publisher official sites
• hatrackriver.com and tor.com
• These sites are the most closely related, after the fansites for the Enderverse. The author's main site has a lot of content on the series, but it also has information about himself and his other books. The publishing company also has a lot of content about the universe, and about fantasy and science fiction, but it has content about a lot of unrelated books.
• Social Media sites
• Examples: Ender's Ansible FB page, Actor pages on Instagram, FB, etc.
• These sites as a whole are unrelated, but pages within the sites focus on things with a relationship to the Enderverse. The actor pages are for those actors who played in the Ender's Game movie.
• Blog sites
• Examples: Book blogs, news blogs, etc.
• These sites were mostly unrelated to the topic, but they made mention of the books or the movie in some way.

Ender's Ansible is focused on official news, discussion and the community surrounding the Enderverse. Exploring the links to the various sites was like listening in on different parts of the community's conversation, looking at how they all interlace. Some of the links added a more narrative style to the site, while others made it seem more of a database. Some of the sites, like hatrack river and Tor have narrative sections and content that logically proceeds or antecedes the content on Ender's Ansible, so the exploration of them is a little like turning the pages of a book. Exploring other links was like moving in completely different directions, rather than following a narrative line.

In some ways, this site is not that great at encouraging the viewer to follow links. Mention of some of the websites, like philoticweb.net, on the main page aren't actually linked to the sites. Without finding the links on other pages, you would have to type the link into the browser yourself. Most of the actual links are in the blog posts on the site, though, so they are easy to access. They're obviously highlighted and colored, placed within the text where the viewer will be likely to click on them because the surrounding context will lead the reader to be interested.