Why I’m resurrecting the ‘link journalism’ argument
June 25, 2008
(hat tip to Chris Brogan for mentioning this issue (and the Scott Karp post) on his AWESOME blog!)
About two years ago, before I lost everything to the ‘oh dear lord’ crash of 2006, I had a tonne of articles talking about a disturbing trend in the blogging/journalistic communities - and that was ‘link love’/'link journalism’.
At the time, a lot of people that read the articles considered them a ‘hail mary’ to the equally disturbing trend of link breakage - sites with stupid amounts of content would sometimes ‘lose’ articles you linked to - which meant that any backwards tracking of your ’sources’ - be them defunct blogs (which, ironically, forced me to remove a lot of my own linked back content after that crash) or news items that had ‘moved’ or ‘vanished’ in everywhere but the Google cache, which in and of itself is finite.
It’s come up again though, via Scott Karp - who makes some great points about the fact that link journalism is something, in today’s Internet climate that could only enrich the material we’re producing for our own blog readers. If we’re citing sources, viewpoints (which we can agree and/or disagree with), and editorial pieces, people become more informed. And need to rely less on places like Google search for their information.
It’s an missed opportunity that highlighted it in that article - but for blogger’s it’s a wider thing. Some of us don’t use or don’t know how to use trackbacks - others just don’t like/want/can be bothered to credit their sources, something that’s easy to spot if you’re all reading the same stuff, in the same communities. Backdating posts does mitigate some of that, but there’s an ethical issue with putting up backdated information on something that’s groundbreaking.
However you look at it though, it’s especially important for writers. We’ve got to find a way to archive our own clips, legally, and with a minimum of breakage - which is why we’re developing a series of templates, at the Writers Host, based on WordPress, to allow writers to store their clips and material, to offer a ‘break free’ service for anyone wanting to link to them. With a little work, we can provide people with an adequate way of linking writing, without changing the way the Internet works, and as an added bonus, we can track who is doing it too. As Chris Brogan points out - the Boston Globe are losing all of their ‘credit’ for linking to him - and eventually, people that encounter sites like that will (and already do) add no follow links back.
Linking to people and sites does NOT haemorrhage traffic - in fact, judicial linking will entrench you as an expert or a trusted source faster than you can blink. And yes, I linked to Chris twice. He’s that good.
What do you guys think? Important or unimportant?
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