interlinktual
Interlinktual - Blogrolling and link-swapping is a topic that comes up often in weblogger land. In the simplest version, this particular law of the blog culture says “if I link to you sometimes, you should link to me sometimes.” This ethic is based on the notion that bloggers value inbound traffic very highly. In fact, bloggers often do get excited when a high-volume site links to their site and generates “flow”. After all, why would people be writing a blog if they didn’t have something to say? And if they have something to say, they probably want as many people as possible to hear it, right? So the law of “link reciprocity” is based on the idea that flow is something that should be returned, if you can. And since there is no “law of conservation of flow”, then flow that someone directs at you isn’t necessarily diminshed by you directing flow back at them later. In fact, all of these cross-flows tend to move all of the participants higher in “google”, which gives even more flow. Admittedly, the people with less flow are more obliged to link back (and link back more frequently) to people with more flow, in a futile attempt to balance out the flow. The big guy linking to the little guy doesn’t gain much flow that way, but he gains standing in google (as reciporical links come back). The little guy is simply happy with the flow he gets, and as soon as he gets enough flow to be bigger than the newest bloggers, he can be big guy to their little guy and ride the google tide. “All it takes is an href, it’s so cool; href me and I’ll href you!”
Rampant cross-linkage isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s the basic mechanism by which academia has operated for centuries. Researchers judge the value of published research based upon the number of other works that cite it. Citations in scientific research form “clusters” of cross-linkage that would suggest citation reciprocity. Groups of people tend to cite one another. Besides reciprocity, there are certainly other reasons that researchers can end up getting sucked into citation clusters. A milder form of reciprocity is mutual admiration. If Dr. Wang cites Dr. Miller five times, Dr. Miller will start to think that Dr. Wang has good judgement. Dr. Miller will pay more attention to what Dr. Wang says, and will be more “open” to appreciating Dr. Wang’s work and perhaps citing it. This will reinforce Dr. Wang’s good perception of Dr. Miller, and pretty soon they might even become buddies and collaborate on work together. In scientific research, though, this is about as overt as reciprocity gets. Academics known as “Intellectuals” don’t have to be quite so covert about reciprocity. Richard A. Posner has written a book called “Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline”. He lists all of the people who (like himself) are Intellectuals. Posner compiled the list by ranking the list of people based on how many times they were cited in public media, and restricted his list of people to those intellectuals who also contribute to public media. As if to prove the point that nobody can better cite an intellectual than another intellectual, one of the men on Posner’s list (Alan Wolfe) quickly published a criticism of Posner’s book. Wolfe calls Posner’s methods and conclusions “nonsensical”. And Slate says that Wolfe is wrong. (I could write an article about how completely confused the Slate article is, but what would be the point?) The point of all these stories is just to show that cross-linking is a hot topic even outside the blogger world right now, and people are very passionate about it.
Of course, blogrolling isn’t an immutable law of the blog culture (although Doc Searls has come dangerously close to suggesting that online journals shouldn’t even be called “blogs” unless they include some degree of link reciprocity). So, should you always reciporicate and expect others to reciporicate? Here are some considerations:
- Do you place a lot of value on inbound links? Well, if you are maintaining a blog, you probably want people to read what you have to say. But links aren’t always a good thing. For example, if you run an athiest blog, and Pat Robertson links to your site, you’ll end up with your discussion groups overrun by zealots and you’ll probably exceed any bandwidth transfer limits imposed by your ISP. Not long ago, people were debating about ways that sites could charge users for the privilege of linking to content deemed valuable. In other words, if you are Encyclopedia Britannica, you might feel that you are doing someone a favor when they link to you, and not the other way around.
- Quality or Quantity? You’ll often link to other sites simply because you find them interesting or think that your readers will find them interesting. In this form, a blog is a fairly intimate communication medium, and your focus is on presenting your comments accurately and authentically to your existing audience (who of course may include other bloggers who are part of the conversation). Biasing your linkage explicitly to return favors or bankroll favors from others can be an effective way to increase the number of people who land on your site, but such linking has to be carefully balanced so that your readers don’t start wondering which links are there because you liked them vs. which links are there because you want to score some points. This is not to say that link reciprocity is incompatible with blog quality, but it is possible to overdo it and turn users off. Blogrolling is sort of like making introductions between friends. There is no easy way to measure how “appropriate” readers find a particular blogroll. Probably blogrolls that have a low clickthrough ratio are less appropriate than blogrolls that have high clickthroughs (if only 5% of the readers click on a link, it was obviously not very interesting to the audience). Another would be to look at how many of the clickthroughs become regular readers. Of course, if you are linking to a site just because you find it interesting, you won’t care about these things. But if you are going to engage in obligatory link reciprocity, you are going to be taking a certain cost on yourself (in terms of authenticity, opportunity, clarity, etc.) and you should make sure that the benefits are worth it. Is your audience sensitive to perceived conflicts of interest or bias? It all depends on how you want your blog to present.
Posner’s “Intellectuals”, pundits, and journalists sometimes engage in avaricious linkage just like bloggers do. But linking for gain isn’t the only way that bias creeps into the media. There have been two really good books recently on this topic: “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News” and “Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism”. This seems to be more of an issue today than in the past decade or so. Journalists used to pay more lip service to things like objectivity and humility, which were the safety guards that prevented their bias from polluting their writings. I think that the fact that the last ten years haven’t had any real news to report led people to not care so much about journalists’ integrity and look instead for entertainment. Now that we have some issues that actually matter (like, we could be killed), people are again paying attention to the objectivity of their news sources. People used to want news that was exciting; now they want news they can trust. You can argue whether it is the journalists’ fault for leaning more towards entertainment than news, or the consumers’ fault for driving the market in that direction. I recently talked to an editor at a leading scientific journal who was telling me about the way that Scientific American had moved more to “popular science”, and how his journal was going to have to do the same, because nobody was paying for “hard news” anymore.
Since this is a blog, I’ll reveal my own bias — personally, I blame the journalists. If nobody is paying for journalism, that doesn’t make it OK to give people something else and call it journalism. The journalists will tell you that “We never claimed to be doing journalism, we called this piece ‘op-ed’ and this piece ‘commentary’ and this piece ‘insight’, so we weren’t misleading anyone.” But this is inexcusable. It used to be that you always knew where the biased page was going to be in a newspaper; it would be at the back, and clearly marked “editorial”. Admittedly, you still had to look out for bias in the other articles, but at least you knew which ones were supposed to be objective, and you could hold the paper accountable for poor journalism. Today, it is virtually impossible to know whether an article is meant to be objective or not, and I doubt that the journalists themselves know. And the lack of any well-defined wall between “op-ed” and it’s 1,000 other names and “hard news” makes it impossible for readers to hold newspapers accountable. My suggestion: every paper should have a section called “news”, which contains only stories meant to be objective, balanced, and unbiased. And if they insist on publishing the rest of the crap, put it in a separate section. The “news” section itself may never be completely free from bias, but at least the readers will be able to hold journalists accountable when slip-ups occur, and they’ll know the relative trustworthiness of what they read in the other sections.