Scoble: Throwing himself under busses so I don’t have to.
My friend, Robert Scoble, has two great rants up about blogging & linking: Big gadget sites don’t link to blogs followed by Pissing off the blogosphere.
His main point is a valid one – far too many places, whether they be old media (The New York Times) or big blogs (Engadget) or even small bloggers who are afraid people won’t read every word they’ve written, don’t link to external sources.
This is actually a huge deal. The real, true power of the web is just that – it’s a web. Everything can be interconnected, and learning about or researching a subject can be vastly easier online than anywhere else. Using hyperlinks is the very reason content belongs online. If you don’t hyperlink your content, why on earth do you have it online?
People often wonder why “old media” is struggling to find a voice and an audience (and a business plan) for online content. Rarely is the fact that “old media” tend to be stingy linkers mentioned – but I suspect it’s actually a fundamental reason people choose to get much of their content elsewhere.
For me, I’ve never really thought about it in these terms until Robert brought it up. I’ve always tried to link everything and anything, even words like “Google” and “Sun” (surely you know that Google = www.google.com and Sun = www.sun.com). Why? Because if I were reading my blog, I would want to just be able to click on pertinent details and dig deeper rather than having to open a new window and Google for the subject at hand. It just makes sense. If a word or phrase can be hyperlinked, and it’s more useful that way, it should be.
By the way, this situation also exposes what’s so great about bloggers, especially the big and popular ones – they write about what’s on their mind, often not even thinking about the impact of what they’re saying. Communication is fast, transparent, and emotional.
Preach on, brother Scoble.
