The Carnegie Council has published an excerpt of a panel discussion in which Jay Rosen, faculty memeber of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, discusses the ethic of the link (YouTube; 4:21). Hypertext links on the web are how we connect knowledge to people, and sometimes more importantly, connect people to people.
The key to what Rosen is saying is that links connect people to knowledge wherever that knowledge may reside. Corporate media has just started to understand the concept that you can grow your audience by sending them away rather than trying to hold them captive. Outbound links are important, what makes the web the web.
Similarly, Kevin Marks has written an important analysis of how Twitter works and why it became so popular. Early proponents of the web—myself included—bemoaned the lack of bidirectionality in its hypertext links. Marks astutely points out that the unidirectionality of hypertext links on the current web enable “the power-law distributed link structure that builds a small-world network to connect the web and provides the basis for Pagerank. Being able to link to something without it having to give you permission by linking back is what enabled the web to grow.”
If you provide content on the web, you need to listen to this video clip and understand what Rosen is saying and then study Marks’ analysis of Twitter. Therein is a large part of the reason why the news industry is in a tailspin.
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