The other day I found myself in a sports centre with a lot of time to kill while I waited for someone. There in the foyer was an internet kiosk. Great, I thought, waste some time on the net! It was just a browser with a keyboard. OK, no problem. But the browser was locked down: you could only view the pages it had loaded, or pages linking from them. You couldn't enter a URL. At that moment the browser was showing the fantastic benefits of recent investment in the sports centre. Borrrrring!

Most importantly, you couldn't use the search box in any page (which otherwise might have thrown up a Google result, or outbound link).

Huh. Unless I could find a way to break out of the kiosk's limited pages onto the wider internet, it looked like I'd have to find some other way to pass the time.

From Beeb to Guardian

Then I noticed that the main page also had little links to the BBC's "latest news" page - just the links, but you could follow them to land on the BBC's site.

Now, how could I get from there to the Guardian to see what was going on at the Technology blog? (Go ahead, try. Remember, you're not allowed to use any search boxes or search engines such as Google. And because you're pretending to be using a public kiosk, you don't trust it with your username or password for any sites; you can only get to pages that any passing person would.)

While I went back and forth on the BBC site, playing a sort of web Breakout, I considered how the internet has changed in the past decade or so.

Years ago, the paradigm was all about trapping people on your site. There were in essence two species of site: "portals" (which tried to get people to go there by linking out to everywhere else, the ur-portal of course being Yahoo!) and "destinations", which tried to be an internet black hole, offering no way out and aiming to keep you there until you clicked on an ad in sheer frustration.

No way out

The classic destination was Deja News, a would-be commercial service that started up in 1995 aiming to archive all the Usenet newsgroup discussions, and to offer a searchable archive. I once did a similar experiment to my web kiosk one on Deja News and discovered that you simply couldn't get out; its walls were thickly coated with internal links. It simply didn't offer any "outward-going link love", as we'd call it today.

Deja News was bought by Google, which rolled it into its Google Groups offering. And Google, as we know, is a portal.

The thing is this: the fewer "destinations" you have on the web, and the more places that (in whatever way) act as portals, the more interconnected it all is. Which has to be a good thing, because it means that the "connectedness" algorithms that search engines use to determine your ranking in results will be more efficient. Ultimately, search triumphs when everyone is connected to everyone via the fewest intermediate links.

I'd love to say that I've found all sorts of scientific research that validate these assertions, but unless I've been looking in completely the wrong place, or in the wrong way, I can't find anything examining interconnectedness and the way it is changing. But changing it is - and the sites that got me to the Guardian from the BBC are doing it.

Escape route

So, the solution to my challenge. The BBC now offers links at the bottom of every story that let you submit them to Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Facebook or StumbleUpon.

Now, all it requires is that you have an account - but if you go to Digg, you can follow a link to the front page. Then you can browse the archives. I followed through until I found something from the Huffington Post, which I happen to know links to the Guardian. I read a couple of pieces there and then followed a link from the "links - news sources" part of the front page to move on to the Guardian - where, knowing that the finish line was almost in sight (click the "blogs" link in the top navigation bar, choose "Sci/Tech", choose "Technology"), I paused to read some more articles, chosen by serendipity.

The clue? These days, social networks and aggregation sites provide the web's backbone, the core that links everything to everything else. The rise of social networking makes a huge difference; you only have to look at the graph of Digg stories at Neoformix to see that interconnectedness is growing.

So, in answer to those who worry that the web is becoming Balkanized - that we're only listening to opinions we like, or people we already agree with - I say: try navigating without your search and location bars. This will take you to more interesting places than you might expect.

If I hadn't set myself a place to go, I could have ended up anywhere. Which is how, in the modern web, it ought to be - not scrabbling around for a link to the outside world, as I all too frequently found myself doing back in the 1990s.