I clicked on one of Jake Tapper’s posts today and saw that he has an interesting way of linking http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/obama-campaign-pounces-on-matt-romney-joke-as-evidence-father-pandering-to-dead-ender-fringe-extremists/, kind of like how I just did in that sentence there.

Personally, I’m not bothered by the style and thought it was kind of interesting. Instead of having some linked text, which hopefully gives me some idea of what I’m clicking over to (and ideally some title text to actually tell me the name of the link), I get full URLs, which in Tapper’s post are sort of descriptive. Not everyone agrees with me.

I can’t tell if this is Tapper’s personal style — I don’t read his blog regularly enough — or just something he did in this one case. It certainly doesn’t appear to be ABC News’ style, as evidenced by this post on the same blog from Devin Dwyer.

I know I’ve gone on a rant about how people should link before, and I don’t think I’m changing the link-in-text style that I have going across most of my posts, but I thought it was interesting and kind of refreshing to see it done differently.

Photo: Profound Whatever on Flickr

Kristian Vinkenes / Flickr

I haven’t seen this news make the rounds on Twitter too much, but I think it’s huge: Beginning August 1, the Associated Press will link directly to stories cited in AP reports.

Nieman:

Pickups will now include a parenthetical bit.ly link to the original story, in addition to the credit. So in the fireworks story, you might see: “According to the Boston Globe report (http://bit.ly/pDHZ6h)…” The change will be most noticeable on state wires, where pickups are common.

Anyone who has read my site knows that AP’s current method of linking — dropping the home page URL of whatever site’s story was cited in the AP report — drives me insane, as it should any journalist. Using a link to a website’s home page as a citation is about as useful as saying “…according to a book I got at the local library” in a term paper. It leaves the reader to fend for himself in terms of digging deeper into the story — stupid, especially when it’s coming from a news organization which exists to inform people.

But enough about why the old way is bad. Bravo to the AP for modernizing itself. I hope that it will continue to modernize and position itself as an example to the news outlets that subscribe to it.

By the way, as long as I’m talking about giving credit, I should mention that this news nugget came via Martha Kang, who runs an excellent Twitter account.

In keeping with that, I found an interesting page on Ryan Sholin’s site, which sort of functions as a newsfeed/link roundup:

Newstangle | Invisible Inkling

Looks like — and I’m thinking in WordPress terms here — he created a category and then ran that category on its own page. It comes up specially flagged on his main page. UPDATE: Should’ve looked back a few posts — he’s importing his Delicious links.

What do you think of this method? Would it be worth it for me to implement something similar on this site? (For the record: I like it.)

Link via Kevin Sablan, who, along with Ryan, runs a kick-ass blog worth subscribing to.

Check out this story about a Naval officer in Kitsap charged with assault in its native AP format:

(Note: I’m not picking on The Seattle Times; I just happened to locate this story on their site via a Google search.)

I noticed the same story on the AP wire and corrected how the link was presented before I posted it to kirotv.com:

(Note: Blue, bold text = hyperlink.)

The difference is that the AP’s way of citing websites doesn’t give any meaningful credit to the sites they take information from — that is, those sites receive no link referrals, which would otherwise help boost their search engine rank. Readers are left copy/pasting a link to a home page and then searching around for the original story if they want more information (guess how often people do that). What if a reader access this story a year from now and wants to look at the original report from the referenced site?

One of my favorite things about my new job is that I can correct this, to a certain degree (again: mountain of AP content).

I’ll continue to alter the AP’s linking style when I find AP content that I want to post to kirotv.com’s home page, but it’s far too late in the game for the AP to still be optimizing for print. Presenting HTML-encoded wires should be standard. It’s pretty easy to delete the code (especially when staffs have all day to work on a newspaper); it’s a hell of a lot harder to comb through all of these referenced websites and put the code in.

Just for posterity, here’s the Kitsap Sun’s original report.

Take this Consumer Reports survey on social sharing, for example: We’ve got a survey that says (in a nutshell) People share too much on social networks and it’s exposing them to security risks... Stats, stats, stats, “Seven things to stop doing on Facebook NOW!” and we’re done.

Over here, we have SFGate.com distilling that information, in their own words, and for some reason, attaching a byline to it. No value has been added to the press release—it’s just a regurgitation of the information.

On the other hand, over here we’ve got Read Write Web, which, after summarizing and linking out to the press release, delves into its own take on the data:

The problem with this report is that it acts as if the burden of online safety should be entirely placed upon social networking users. While there are some obvious areas where people need to think smarter, some of the real issues regarding these networks are being ignored.

With social networks – Facebook in particular – privacy settings are too often obscured or are confusing and so therefore are generally overlooked by the majority of a social network’s users.

I’m not saying SFGate should’ve done it as well as RWW—the latter is a dedicated tech blog that specializes in news about social networking—but I do find it a little shocking that a publication that’s no stranger to economic strife still finds it necessary to fund parroting. There were any number of ways they could have cut down the time involved in creating their post and made it better:

• Quote a few bits of data—whichever they thought were most relevant—and link out to the PR Newswire release (conveys information);
• Quote some data, link out and ask people if they “overshare” (conveys information, stimulates discussion);
• Do a Google search for the press release—maybe they would’ve found the RWW story (conveys information, adds value).

Any one or any combination of those three would’ve saved time that could’ve been spent creating original content and would’ve given readers either the same value as what was actually posted or more.

I skim through the 18-paragraph piece and at the end, find this:

There’s absolutely no good in linking to the source of literally all your information when the link exists at the end of an 18-paragraph story. And it’s even less useful to link to their home page. What if I access this story in a year? This story is going to be buried somewhere in the Everett Herald’s digital basement, not surrounded with lights on the home page.

I know newsbrands like the Everett Herald have agreements and contracts with the AP that allows AP to do these kinds of things, but it’s not the legality I’m concerned with—it’s the relevance to readers. The Herald’s version of the story has a related link, a PDF file of juror’s instructions and a comment thread (oddly absent on the pi’s site).

As long as the AP is making changes, they should embrace the ethics of online publishing more completely. If they want to stay relevant, they have to start leading on these things.

Source: cindy47452's Flickr stream

I’ve taken to calling poorly linked sites “rope sites.” The gist is pretty simple: A rope, unfurled and dangling, can be pretty useful—repelling down a wall, for instance—but once you get to the end off it, all that’s left to do is hang on or fall off. If the ground’s right there, you’re going to let go immediately, and everyone’s going to let go eventually.

Much like dangling ropes, sites and pages that don’t link to themselves or to others are destined to be useful only for a short time.

The news industry is probably the worst at producing rope sites. Despite the fact that they’ve got multiple people producing multiple pages 24 hours a day, something (probably the Old Print culture) has kept them from embracing the ethic of the link for far too long. Just a couple weeks ago, I came across a page on The Seattle Times site; it was a story that referenced a huge investigative piece the Times had produced several years ago—but there was no link to the piece. I Tweeted the missed opportunity to the Times and, socially savvy people they’ve become (more on that in the coming weeks), they responded and added the link (third paragraph).

Good on the Times for seeing the value in a self-link (it’s also good for SEO), but I think we can all agree that it’s not exactly the industry wide standard that it needs to be.

The reason we’ve coined the terms Internet and Web (or in lolspeak: interwebz) is because this big mess of digital information is interconnected with links and those links create a web or net. Nets and webs are nothing more than ropes that have been tied together, but they’re arguably much more valuable. Unlike a rope that has a definite end to it, webs spread out; they catch things.

Source: Anatoly Kraynikov's Flickr stream

If you’re a news site, a web catches readers and there are essentially two types of webs you can build: a self-contained web (i.e. links to other pages on your site) and an all-encompassing web (i.e. links to other sites). A good site will build both kinds of webs: it will self-reference when appropriate (re: the aforementioned Times story) and it will link out when it references another site or page. Two sites to pay attention to when considering either of these approaches:

Wikipedia (self-contained)

Since I always reference the Wikipedia page on time-travel, I’ll use it again here: visit it and try not to click through to a few other pages. Wikipedia has mastered the art of self-reference. Now think of your news site as Wikipedia. How many times a week do you post a story that references something you already reported? How many times do you think to link back to that story? Fix that. And link to everything you’ve written before. (Note: Wikipedia also links out, for purposes of citation.)

Google (all-encompassing)

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: What does Google do all day? Link to sites that aren’t Google. What do people do all day? Keep coming back to Google. It’s real simple: People don’t just want to consume information, they want to be connected to it. If you’re writing about a concert, link to where tickets can be bought (and add value by linking directly—I can log on to Ticketmaster’s home page and do a search on my own); if you visited three Web sites while researching your story, link to those; etc. People aren’t going to leave your site and never come back; they’re going to remember you as a good, savvy source of information and look to you for another need, or for the same need in the future.

One last thing: Great content is always important and bad content will almost always kill a site. But as important as content is, it’s not enough to build traffic. Learn the ethics of how the Internet operates—learn to link and know how and when to link. Paired with great content, it’s a combination that will give you the best return for your efforts.

Source: uacheesehead on Flickr

I’m unable to find whichever sources originally relayed this story to me, so what follows is mostly anecdotal.

Back in 1998, when pro wrestling was at the height of its popularity, the then-WWF pulled this publicity stunt wherin members of their D-Generation-X stable “invaded” rival WCW’s Monday Nitro TV show (WWF’s Raw is War was being filmed nearby that same night). This pretty much consisted of driving a Jeep around and trying to gain access to the arena where Nitro was being filmed. Network competition between the two was huge at the time, so shenanigans like this were, I guess, some attempt to sway the tides (or at least to placate Vince McMahon and his thunderous ego).

D-X was locked out of the WCW arena, so no great drama ensued. Then it dawned on (D-X leader) Triple H that WCW might try the same thing on WWF’s show, so he asked Vince, “What do we do if they try to come in here?” Supposedly, Vince responded with something like, “Screw it, let ‘em in. Which would you rather watch: the show with no one on it, or the show with everyone on it?“

This doesn’t mirror the idea of link journalism exactly—for that, Vince would’ve had to say, “We’ll just let in the best wrestlers from their show.” The point, however, is that WCW put up a wall while Vince McMahon was ready to bring a larger audience to his show by augmenting it with “content” from a competitor. That didn’t mean sacrificing his show or watering it down with an inferior product, either. It just meant that, hey, you like wrestling and you can either see WCW’s guys on the WCW show or you can see WCW’s and WWF’s guys on the WWF show. (Reportedly, by the way, this show was the first time in almost two years that WWF beat WCW in the Monday night ratings.)

You can sit around and pretend like everyone in town is coming to your site for everything or you can actually make it so that everyone in town comes to your site for everything. Don’t worry about sending people away—they’ll come back. Google does it all day.

His issue—link overload—is something I have to admit I haven’t really encountered before. I subscribe to Jay Rosen’s train of thought: “As a blogger, what I try to do is do everything well, all the time, and give you way more than you asked for, every single time you come to my blog—more knowledge than you thought, more links than you bargained for….” That’s not to say I try and flood my blog with links simply for the sake of doing so (I don’t think Jay Rosen does, either). I link in blog posts for three reasons:

1. To show my work;
2. To properly cite materials that I reference;
3. To recommend further reading that I think might serve the people reading my thoughts.
   

So the idea of “too much linking” is, to me, a little perplexing—I link as much as is necessary. (Note: I feel it necessary to mention that linking does carry SEO implications—the more sites that link to you, the higher (potentially) your Google rank goes, and the more you link out to other sites, the more likely it is one or a few of them will link back to you.) I’ll admit there are some pages with more links than one could ever reasonably be expected to click on (with even more links within those links!), but I don’t think that’s a bad thing (it’s like being overwhelmed by all the books in a library). Maybe there’s a middle ground—some button, widget or line of code that could say, “Hide hyperlinks on this page,” at the top of each post.

What do you think?

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