As this blog has been running for a couple of years now, I think one of the most important parts of my job as a blogger is to use hyperlinks well. Personally, I have really embraced the concept of hyperlinking within my posts, as I think it is important, but others don’t seem to understand the true usefulness of hyperlinking.

Hyperlinking is an issue for many websites, as most refuse to do it. The BBC news website for example does not embed any links to external sources. The reason for this is two fold. Firstly when a writer puts a hyperlink within a post to an external site, their content is then link to the content of a third party’s site, which they do not control. This lack of control is a problem as if the third party, changes the content on the linked page to something different or inappropriate, the author may become libel. Secondly, if the linked site decides to take the post/page down, change their URL structure or the entire site goes down, this would therefore brake the hyperlink. Hyperlinking on a BBC’s news site would be complex, as it would add overhead, as a team would have to be created to check each linked site is still up and content on the linked page is the same. Then is there really a place for hyperlinking on news sites and the web in general?

I think that hyperlinking is extremely inportant if you understand how to do it correctly. Sites such as Lifehacker have the best way of crediting stories. I think what Lifehacker and others like Gizmodo,  understand that news is disposable. By this I mean that most news/blog posts are read within a week of posting and are rarely read again. It is perfectly reasonable to post hyperlinks within a page as the problem of broken links is not an issue as content on an external site is unlikely to change in a week. As most of the blogosphere is an echo chamber these days, I feel that many don’t wish to hyperlink as it only proves that their job is not one of a reporter but a reposter.  If you are going to repost a story with little more than rewriting the facts in it, the least you can do is give complete credit to the original post.

The most important use of linking is the ability to recap someone new to long running stories such as the recent E.coli infection at petting farms. This is an on going story, but what if you didn’t see the first story if you were away from a tv/pc? Would you be able to understand later posts on this subject? Would you be able to come in to a story half way through and make sense of it? Personally, I have had this problem a number of times and found it extremely hard to catch-up to a story from the start as, when I search on google news, I only get the latest updates on the story. If for example, BBC news put a link to the original story in the first line of the post, this might make the process of getting up to speed a lot easier.

The biggest thing that is pushing linking forward is social networking sites. The first site that started social link sharing was digg. Instead of having a blog that you post links to pages that interest you, you can “digg” a story, increasing it’s ranking and likelihood it is on the homepage. Where digg started, Twitter has now replaced social linking. With URL shorting services such as bit.ly, the micro blog service has become an internet giant, simply by being able to posts links to their followers. Not only can links to pages be shared, people can even be referenced as a hyperlink, which can be seen  by the biggest social networking site Facebook which have recently added the Twitter‘s @symbol linking system.

Linking is important for any post or site, it helps people get a more rounded understanding of the subject that is being discussed. It also shows that the writer doesn’t live in a bubble and that they understand that the internet is a fluid and social media. That information can be linked so easily together is amazing in the first place, in books, if the author wishes to reference another text, they would have to give the book name and page number. On the internet it is so easy and so useful, there is no reason not to do it.