Photo: Liz Jones on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
How do you put the web into the world wide web? By linking.
I do link-heavy posts once a day because it's a useful snapshot of what's going on in the industry (or more accurately both industries) and anyway, it's a kind of by-product of the news-trawling process I do every day. So I thought'd I share that process by aggregating them all and publishing through Del.icio.us.
It has been noted before that the role of the editor will only become more important and not less. You can set up multiple keyword alerts, subscribe to every newsletter going and be algorithmed up to the hilt, but it is still more valuable to have those result edited and interpreted by a human editor. Hence the Newsbuckets every day.
But moving on. Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0 has a great post about the values of influencers and links; "the link is the principal driver of 'network efforts' and influence," he says.
"Whenever I give talks to traditional publishers who have been afraid to link to other sites because it will 'send people away' instead of keeping them trapped in the publisher's own content, my now standard response is to say that there's a site that does nothing but link to other sites - all it does is send people away. And yet remarkably, people keep coming back. So much so, that this strategy has translated into $10 billion+ in advertising revenue. (Yes, Google of course.)"
Karp's point is that the influence comes from both the technique of linking and the size of the network that picks up on those links. Links have a whole economy of their own; look at TechMeme and Digg and the power that those systems have over their early-adopter users.
And he's right that traditional news organisations have lost a huge amount of influence and weight online because their content publishing systems, for the most part, don't allow links and don't encourage writers to add them.
Source: Publishing 2.0
Technorati Tags: Delicious, Google, Digg, TechMeme
