But still, the link maintains its value as a contextual device, one that allows the reader to navigate his way through labyrinthine topics, chasing them down the rabbit hole of sources to some modicum of understanding not afforded by less “evolved” mediums. Theoretically, with the links I’ve provided thus far in this article you won’t have to take any of my arguments at face value but instead can examine the source material and reach your own conclusion. This article is merely a guidepost from which a thesis begins but doesn’t necessarily end.

Or, if you’re Nicholas Carr, you think that any contextual benefits I’ve provided above are outweighed by the cognitive burden I’ve placed upon your brain, a brain that has been limping through this article under the weight of links that have crippled your reading comprehension.

In a widely-linked (some people find this ironic) post titled “experiments in delinkification,” he drew from his soon-to-be-released book, The Shallows, which argues that the Internet is rewiring our brains. Citing research that found reading comprehension drops with the inclusion of links, Carr suggested that perhaps we should return to the era of footnotes and cordon off our contextual links at the bottom of a post, a format used to some extent on Wikipedia (though on-site inner linking is allowed within wiki articles). “Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out),” he wrote. “But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read.” True to form, he displayed his citations of works mentioned in the post at the bottom and urged his readers to “try it yourself. You may be surprised.”

To many — even those who may agree with his central thesis — the suggestion seemed anachronistic. While the value of links to the content creator has always been debatable, few would dismiss the value extracted by the reader. How could too much context be a bad thing?

“I feel like the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages,” Matthew Ingram told me in a phone interview. Ingram, a former communities editor for The Globe and Mail who now writes for Gigaom, was one of the first to criticize Carr’s missive. “That includes any disadvantages in terms of cognitive overload or comprehension. There’s a whole host of things that can interfere with you and your reading — flashing banner ads, something in the sidebar, or an ad inserted in the post. Compared to those things, links are rather innocuous, provided they’re styled the right way.”

But Carr told me that most of his critics had misread him. His problem isn’t necessarily with the hyperlink, but with the very web itself. “Obviously the web exists,” he said in a phone interview. “The central structure of the web as a medium is the link. It’s a hyperlinking system, it’s a hypertext system, it’s a hyper media system. So it would be silly to argue that links aren’t compelling and don’t give huge benefits and aren’t an effective way of highlighting related works … I think it’s interesting to think about where links appear and where we link because it gives us insights into how we read and how we think. But I’m not naive about people suddenly not including links in their online writing.”

Despite his suggestion that links should be relegated to the bottom of essays and blog posts or done away with all together, one of Carr’s main complaints is what he called the “debasement of the link.” It’s not the existence of links that bother him, but that websites are too promiscuous in using them. “In the beginning it was assumed that a link was a sincere citation, that you were highlighting something that you thought was important or worth reading,” he said. “In fact, the entire Google search engine as first envisioned by Larry Page was entirely a reflection of the fact that links were sincere tokens of value. They were a true currency of the importance of different things. One of the unintentional byproducts of the Google system becoming so popular is that it has been debased as a currency. What we see today is all sorts of gaming of links, all sorts of elaborate self linking, all sorts of automatic linking, where people don’t think about where to link to. They’ll link either back to their own site or into Wikipedia without going out and assessing what they’re linking to. I think the entire — what’s been called the link economy — is much less valuable than it used to be. That’s the process that we have to judge the effectiveness and the value and the quality of the entire web system today. It’s a big problem.”

But Ingram provided a different reason for Carr’s worry, one that didn’t stem from his concern for the web user but for his own authority. Echoing criticisms launched at newspaper curmudgeons who say that the internet is a wild wild west that doesn’t reward credibility, Ingram argued that Carr is giving voice to a “very powerful subconscious, or in some cases conscious” reaction to linking. “And that is you send people away from what you’ve written. That is a fundamental thing about the link, is that you’re effectively saying, ‘hey go to this other place.’ I think the fear is that people might like what they see there better or might not come back, or that you are somehow saying what other people have to say is equally important to what you have to say. I think particularly for academics and authors like Nick, that’s an uncomfortable admission, that other people have things that are equally valuable to say. So they’d rather have people stick with you for 800 to 1,000 words and not have any links at all.”

And for Ingram, including links at the bottom of the posts isn’t adequate. Without links in the text, he said, it would be difficult to extract any context from the content in the post or essay, which in his mind creates a kind of irony. “Nick’s talking about the comprehension and cognitive overload, but you have to do a lot of work by the time you get to the bottom of the post to figure out what the heck those links refer to. So you have to go to back to the text and say, ‘oh I guess this is what he was talking about with this link.’ So even if you get to the bottom you still have to do a lot of work.”

Perhaps another irony is that the footnote — the old-school citation on which Carr models his own delinked posts — is perhaps one of the biggest reading distractions of them all. How many times have you paused in your reading to scroll your eyes down to a tiny textual nugget of arcane knowledge before trying to resume the main narrative of a book? The world is full of distractions, the link is just one of many. And some distractions, I would argue, are welcome.

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This tends to happen most often in political blogs. For instance, in 2006 conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote a hit piece accusing the NY Times of needlessly endangering the life of Donald Rumsfeld by publishing pictures of his house. It wasn’t long before several bloggers tore her argument to shreds by showing that just about everything she had asserted was demonstratively false. At one point it even came to light that the NY Times photographer had received permission from Rumsfeld for taking the photo. Eventually, Malkin was pressured to write a follow-up post so that she could respond to her critics.

The result? A post that went to every length to never link to the blogs that destroyed her arguments. Instead, she sets up strawman after strawman and then knocks them down with a back-sliding flourish of intellectual dishonesty, a whirlwind of arm thrashing and punches in the dark.

The wonderful thing about the internet is that it’s easy to provide context. The mainstream media is often criticized for providing out-of-context sound-bites. But when I’m criticizing an article, say, in the New York Times, I have the benefit of not only providing choice quote soundbites, but also linking to the article so that skeptical readers can read it in full. I can have my cake and eat it too.

Which brings me to a recent email exchange I had with a writer for the National Review.

I had been skimming through its Media Blog when I came across a post titled “Metrics for Success” In the post, Kevin D. Williamson provides a throw-away criticism of an article on LewRockwell.com.

As you can probably predict, Williamson criticized the article without ever linking to it, an action that annoyed me enough that I shot him an email:

Kevin,

I’m curious; you wrote about an article on leerockwell.com but didn’t link to it. Why? Don’t you think that if a blogger is critical of an article that appears online, that he should link to it so that his readers can read it in its entirety if they want to weigh the merits of his criticism?

–Simon

His flip response that arrived a few minutes later was entirely predictable:

I don’t always link to everything I mention, especially if I don’t think the item worth reading. I believe everybody knows that they can find lewrockwell.com articles at lewrockwell.com, if they are so inclined.

Thanks for writing.

Yours,
Kevin

To which I responded:

Somehow I think that if the tables were turned and another blogger started criticizing one of your posts by cherry-picking quotes from it and not linking to it you would be quite annoyed.

And sure, I could criticize something at nytimes.com and assume that if a reader really wanted to he could visit the website and do an archive search, but those assumptions are silly considering I can take the five extra seconds to link to it.

You say that it’s not an item worth reading, and yet it’s an item worth responding to?

–simon

You see, Williamson. Even though your blog post violated one of my biggest pet peeves — and would therefore qualify as a post “not worth reading,” as you put it — I still linked to it anyway. You know why? Because I have respect for my readers and allow them to read your post in full to get context.

Given that you’re writing for a “media blog,” I shouldn’t have to give you lessons in Blogging 101.

For consistency, I only included blogs that used the Sitemeter web traffic measurer. For each blog, I added up the web visits (sometimes referred to as unique visitors, though this term can be misleading) of the first six months and the next six months. After tallying up these figures I compared them to see if the blog’s readership increased or decreased. With liberal blogs, I consistently saw decreases, some of which were quite sharp. For the conservative blogs, I saw a significant increase in the number of visits.

Now, it’s very difficult to make conclusions based on these findings. It could be that the liberal blogosphere is experiencing a Long Tail effect, meaning that readers of liberal blogs are spreading out over a larger range of websites. And though liberal blogs showed a sharp decline in web visits during 2007, this isn’t to say that their overall visits didn’t increase compared to 2006 — it’s hard to say, since Site Meter only tracks the previous 13 months.

Either way, it is certainly an interesting trend. Below you’ll see my findings, first with major liberal blogs and then major conservative blogs.

LIBERAL BLOGS

Daily Kos:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 87,373,521
Total visits for second half of 2007: 86,994,331
A decrease of 379,190, or .4%

Crooks and Liars:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 29,670,556
Total visits for second half of 2007: 29,296,242
A decrease of 374,314, or 1%

Eschaton/Atrios

Total visits for first half of 2007: 18,376,378
Total visits for second half of 2007: 15,025,963
A decrease of 3,350,415, or 18%

Fire Dog Lake:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 13,558,479
Total visits for second half of 2007: 9,940,658
A decrease of 3,617,821, or 27%

Hullabaloo/Digby:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 4,807,916
Total visits for second half of 2007: 4,557,295
A decrease of 250,621, or 5%

CONSERVATIVE BLOGS

Instapundit:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 31,950,398
Total visits for second half of 2007: 36,729,803
An increase of 4,779,405, or 15%

Michelle Malkin:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 18,734,829
Total visits for second half of 2007: 24,435,479
An increase of 5,700,650, or 30%

Hot Air:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 18,272,454
Total visits for second half of 2007: 24,566,481
An increase of 6,294,027, or 34%

Red State:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 4,276,010
Total visits for second half of 2007: 4,980,036
An increase of 704,026, or 16%

Right Wing News:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 1,764,729
Total visits for second half of 2007: 1,783,724
An increase of 18,995, or 1%

1. Gawker Media’s founder decides he doesn’t need no stinkin’ bloggers, he’ll edit and manage the Gawker blog himself.

2. If you’re reading this, this is what your facebook news feed will look like in 30 years.

3. Yet another article about newspapers trying to adapt to the online world. Like just about every other article of its kind, it fails to acknowledge that though news rooms are shrinking, the number of full-time bloggers is growing. At an equal rate? Who knows? But it certainly would paint a better picture of the journalism industry if we’d at least give it some cursory thought.

Prior to founding Trend Macrolytics with David Gitlitz, Don was Vice Chairman and co-Chief Investment Officer of Barclays Global Investors, where he worked with the world’s largest institutional investors to create innovative indexing and quantitative investment management strategies.

After Barclays, Don was CEO and co-founder of MetaMarkets.com, and manager of the pathbreaking OpenFund — the world’s first mutual fund to disclose all its holdings and trading activity in real-time on the Internet.

Don was the inventor of the POSIT ECN, and founder of Investment Technology Group at Jefferies & Company. He has been a hedge fund manager and an options market maker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Pacific Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange.

Don runs a web-log based on his forthcoming book, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid — in which he examines the obstacles to wealth creation by ordinary people. He is the author of Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide, and editor of Portfolio Insurance: The Guide to Dynamic Hedging, both published by Wiley & Company.

Don’s columns are published weekly on SmartMoney.com and he contributes frequently to National Review Online, where he writes the Krugman Truth Squad column. He appears regularly on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company” and on Bloomberg TV, CNN and Fox News. He was formerly a columnist for TheStreet.com and Business 2.0. His commentaries have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Pensions & Investments, the American Spectator, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Detroit News.

Simon Owens: Do you think that political blogs are able to create an effective checks and balance on the Mainstream Media? Do they tend to ignore bloggers when they point out mistakes in their reporting?

Don Luskin: The MSM is very defensive of its credibility, and is loathe to point out serious errors no matter who points them out. It’s all the worse when upstart media competitors like bloggers point out the errors.

Simon Owens: Many mainstream journalists grow frustrated with bloggers because there doesn’t seem to be much of a filtration system to their reporting. Do you think there’s an validity to this frustration?

Don Luskin: Yes and no. It’s true that blogs are unfiltered. But editorial filters are themselves unfiltered. You are always reading words that are the product of somebody’s judgment. Who filters the filter? At least with blogs there are no illusions. You aren’t told there is some wise editor who somehow knows that only truth will get published.

Simon Owens: Conservative political bloggers have grown furious with the New York Times for its recent set of leaks, yet at the same time one of the most important things about democratic governments is that they must remain as transparent as humanly possible. When is it ok to publish a leak and when should newspapers hold back?

Don Luskin: It surprises me that there aren’t more objections to the leaks themselves, but rather to the fact that the leaked content gets published. If government can’t keep its own secrets, whose fault is that really? From the standpoint of a media outlet, if some government official is telling you a story, how can you think the government doesn’t want you to publish it? You are between a rock and a hard place if one government official tells you the information and another begs you not to publish it, as appears to be the case with the SWIFT surveillance.

Simon Owens: You often refer to the New York Times as the “elite.” What do you think causes this elitist atmosphere in journalism?

Don Luskin: It is literally a cultural elite, with its members drawn from filtration processes including Ivy League schools, best families, and so on. It is also an elite in the sense that the Times is indisputably a tastemaker and trendsetter – small number of people with enormous influence. But when you come right down to it, most media have the property of being elitist simply because they are one-way “I talk you listen” propositions, with enormous capital costs creating barriers to entry. Of course blogs change all that. Though even within the blog world, there will always be an elite – the most popular blogs with the widest audiences. They tend to act like the MSM because they, too, are one-way “I talk you listen” propositions, and that always goes to one’s head.

Simon Owens: As someone who has appeared on live television, are there many differences between the televised political world and the political blogosphere?

Don Luskin: There are all the differences in the world. Blogging is personal and natural, and can be a reflection of one’s own personality and style. Television is a highly controlled and structured environment in which guests must fit into very narrow time slots, and cannot really express themselves because they are always responding to surprise questions asked by someone else. There are elements in common, though. Television succumbs to the temptation to be sensationalistic, in a quest for a wide audience. Blogs often do the same thing.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Don Luskin: I always get a laugh from Best of the Web Today by Jim Taranto. For people interested in economics/politics, I’d suggest Greg Mankiw’s blog, EconoPundit, Reality is Unreal, and George Reisman’s blog.

Related posts: Interview with Angry Bear, To The People blogger owes the ACLU $100 and me an apology, New Trends in online traffic

While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information.

The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year.

…

The number of monthly visitors to each site rose at rates ranging from 185 percent (Citysearch) to 528 percent (Blogger.com) between February 2005 and February 2006. Their growth far exceeded the 4 percent increase in overall Internet visitors in the United States during that period.

Watch this space in the future, because I’ll have an exclusive interview with a person who has used a networking site (Facebook) to hook up with girls and have sex. Scandalous!

via Search engine blog

I thought it would be fun to list all the different reasons people blog for – I’ve posted a few below, but I’m sure you can come up with more reasons.

Blogging for Chicks

Despite this being a geek’s ultimate fantasy (although some might say this is third to money and fame, but they are lying out of their skins), I’ve never heard anyone pick up chicks through their blogging efforts. Maybe because we tend to reveal too much of ourselves, and women want strong men, not wimpy geeks who post about their feelings on their personal journals (no offense Simon )?

Note that women don’t usually need to go to such extreme measures to pick up guys, so this doesn’t apply (It is my long-standing belief that a guy will accept any girl (above a bare minimum standard) as long as he doesn’t have a better option; unfortunately the opposite is not so true.).

So how does one blog to pick up chicks? Maybe this deserves a whole new blog? I’ll definitely write about this topic in the future.

Blogging for Money

This has been hyped too much already (and is the reason behind the deluge of splogs (spam blogs)). The truth is that most bloggers don’t make much money by just blogging. They invariably have something else lined up (a job (death in a cubicle) or some other business). Fulltime bloggers rarely end up earning enough to live off their blogs.

If you’re blogging for money, please don’t quit your day job, and for the love of God, have more than one iron in the fire. In other words, don’t focus on one stream of income – that is as stupid as quitting your job to become a fulltime blogger without having any experience in blogging or making money online.

If you want to make money from your blogging, my advice is to read, read and read. Performancing and ProBlogger are two of the best resources on this (I’ll be reviewing Performancing soon, so keep a lookout for that – maybe we can get Nick or Chris to give us an interview).

PR Blogging

This applies to all company blogs. This form of blogging also comes pre-packaged with a finite focus (public relations for the said organization) so all the blogger really needs to do is write well (easier said than done).

Personally, I’d like to see more and more companies become accessible through blogging – the interaction and conversations from blogs go a long way towards building brand loyalty.

Personal Journals

I have a personal journal. Simon has one. It is how most people start with blogging. We usually don’t interview personal blogs, but that is probably because most of these blogs are directed towards friends and are not terribly interesting for strangers (unless you are the kind of stranger who enjoys reading about random peoples’ daily routines).

Blogging for Recognition/Fame

This is where all the other blogs (almost all of them) go in. Whenever you are showcasing content for other people to read, you’re looking for recognition. It’s a crude definition, and I’m sure you guys can give me a better one, but for now it works.

Blogging for fame is sort of like selling yourself – it’s not always pretty, and it’s not always successful, and it invariably ends up bruising your ego.

Are you an ego-blogger? Aren’t we all?

So…

Why do you blog?

If you think we should interview someone interesting or review a really cool blog, write to us and let us know.