talking to the outsiders
April 1, 2004
A friend of mine had asked for a critique on a (fairly successful) website that he's largely responsible for, and I had forgotten my offhand comment until it was repeated back to me today. My biggest complaint about the site? "You have no presence in the part of the web that has links."
I think that sums up not just the blogosphere, but the ancillary parts of the web peopled by web enthusiasts, by Google addicts, by news junkies, by young people who've grown up on the web, and of course by bloggers. It's still a small slice of the web overall, but it has an incredibly disproportionate influence on not just the rest of the net, but on contemporary culture as a whole.
I don't know that I'd have guessed 10 years ago that there would be parts of the web that aren't link-dense, and that are largely limited to internal links. But people like to put up walls, I guess. At least until they see what opportunities it costs them.
4 TrackBacks
Anil Dash offers a good critique of many blogs today. Too many blogs do not link to other sources. Not only does this ignore the power of the web, Anil's point, but it also encourages intellectual dishonesty. Chances are that... Read More
Bloggers are engaged in a self-referential, self-overhearing conversation with each other. Occasionally the conversations break out into the culture at large, but not as often as we think. Read More
Anil makes some great points about sites that don't link out... Read More
Two different themes came together today with Google's Gmail announcement and Kinja's web based RSS aggregation. Google thinks it can fund 1g of disk per user via advertisements. Actually, if you look at the going rate, it looks like... Read More
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Amen, Anil. It is all about the links here on the web.
How do people join that part of the living web? By making links themselves perhaps, by participating. The bloggers, the small but active slice of the web, they are the people knitting all of this together. They play an active role in the information ecology, churning things up and connecting them. So if you're not going to join them, by creating links yourself, you need to at least make yourself an attractive link. Not everyone should be Mahir, but there is some kind of generosity of spirit, bravery or honest foolhardiness that can win attention, and presence.
i have a page of links that rarely changes. i post the occasional news story or interesting weblog post. there is no credo for the weblog writer, "thou shalt link to no less than three external and new sites per day," so it's hard to imagine that a) there are unwritten expectations of me as a weblog writer, and b) that any guidelines will ever become feasible and generally accepted in the weblog writing community. so i guess the rule of thumb should be "give back what you can to your community."
Don't beat me for saying this, but isn't something like Microsoft's Smart Tags a solution to this? If the content providers don't provide links, then the user, the browser, or the community might want to. If we had something like Smart Tags, but built around networks of trust (trust always being a problem with Microsoft or any big corporation when they pick what links go where on pages that aren't theirs), wouldn't that resolve the linkless issue? It'd be coooool if I could go to a page, hit a bookmarklet, and see what any one of many communities would recommend linking to for any relatively unique string on that page: what the BoingBoing crowd, MeFi users, Farkers, Freepers, whoever. Or even combine them, so you could have battling networks of trust: communities A + B + C + etc. would show me only those recommended links in which all three communities have some kind of agreement, or where there is no conflict. You could get your communities from Friendster, Kinja, your blogroll, wherever. This kind of auto-linking could also be done on the server end, for lazy webmasters, or just those who want to *really* integrate into what they perceive as their community.
Also, there was that plugin a while back that let users leave comments for other users directly on a site, in a kind of sticky-note fashion: awful implementation, and bad that it required a plugin, but the idea of the community adding value directly to a site was spot on.
As I said back during the big to-do over Smart Tags, 90% of the complaints about them were wrong-headed: the big problem with them wasn't that the page author's control was being violated, but that they weren't providing any real value for the user. Insisting on the author's moral right to total control over the browsing experience is a bad way to proceed, and antithetical to the way the web works best.
And, in fact, a too-strong insistence on that is a way that commercial content sites can screw themselves over. In the early days, it was common for newspaper and other corporate sites to discourage others from "deep linking" directly to content-- they wanted to insist on everyone coming in through a common entry tunnel (that often delivered the ad revenue), as if the site were a physical building with a single front door. I used to wonder why pages were on the Web at all if people didn't want them linked to. It's a great way to keep anyone from linking to your site-- if the user has to follow a long string of navigation directions to get to the interesting content after following the link, the user is probably not going to follow the link, and not many people will bother putting it up in the first place.
I don't really like to places that much and I took down a very small link page I had, which only linked to a handful of friends. I don't blog in the usual way of providing a tonne of outside information, yet I continune to receive over 75,000 hits a day. I also get hundreds of emails daily from people that say they spent forever on my site(s).
So, I think linking is very important if you, yourself, cannot provide something interesting.