It is the tradition in the blogosphere to provide live links to sites, quotes, images, videos and other items mentioned in blog posts. Maddeningly, (and I am being uncharacteristically polite,) the online versions of traditional media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal (links to stock quotes only) and lots more of the biggies don’t give live URLs.
If you want to go deeper into one of their stories, you have to copy and paste the name of the site into a new browser window, adding www. and .com refeix and suffix. (IF they have even provided the site name.)
Here for example, is a Times story about Thefacebook.com that doesn’t have a live link to the freakin Facebook site.
What’s the matter guys? Are you afraid that you’ll lose your readers if you let them go to other sites? Never heard of opening a link in a new browser window? Don’t want to give links because you equate them to free advertising?
Live links are one of the reasons that blog posts spread so fast. The dead-tree-media-no-links-approach is a BB (before blogs) needs to go the way of the horse and buggy.
Why Blogs Are Better Than Mainstream Media
BL Ochman | December 1, 2004 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) | TrackBack (
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Categories: Blogging and Moblogging
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Live links are fundamental to effective use of the Web. I blogged a more complete comment in response to B.L.’s remarks at http://www.sunagency.ca/weblog/ on Dec. 1/04
Ian O’Neill
AdShift
nice comment. keep the work!
danny
Look, the reason live links are not used is simply that the web is an unreliable source. No news organization is going to provide a link because it ties the news org. to the link’s destination. This is simply not going to fly until there is a reliable way to verify the credentials of any source.
Essive: you misunderstood what I said. If the Journal or the Times run an article about a website or a blog, they spell out the URL but do not make it a live link. This has nothing to do with reliability of the Internet.
The Internet is created for the purpose of linking information. Not using live links is a fossilized approach to covering news.