The Rule of Links

Posted on October 3, 2003 by glasscastle

The list
of amazing essays going up in anticipation of BloggerCon has
grown again with the addition of Dave Winer’s The
Rule of Links and The
Rule of Win-Win. The ideas therein are important and well-presented,
although personally, as soon as I hear a "Rule" formally proposed
or established I start thinking of creative ways to break it. But hey,
that’s just me.

I especially like the "Rule
of Links". In a very real sense links are at the heart of
weblogging, and the weblog phenomena itself can be seen as an inevitable
extension of the propagation of hyper-text. I think I am starting to get
the hang of it myself, although it is sometimes tricky knowing what needs
to be linked, and to what.

But I question whether linking is an obligatory feature of anything that
can be called a weblog. What about the short, sweet and intensely insightful
postings of a wizened widowed grandmother tending an herb patch in Nova
Socia and reflecting on her storied past as a Be-Bop xylophonist in the
40’s, the specific shade of blue in the early morning sky over Prince Edward
Island, and a childrens’ story she is writing for her grandchildren? She
posts everyday, early in the morning, as she waits for her herbal tea to
steep, and includes nary a link outside her own self-contained world. Is
she not a blogger? In some ways is she not the quintissential blogger?

Are links really essential in EVERY blog?
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2 Responses to The Rule of Links

  1. bmo says:
    October 3, 2003 at 5:38 pm

    No, of course not, Michael, you’re right. Especially so for the writerly blogs. I am constantly blown away by some of the wonderfully written blogs and or journals that do not generally link. (Dervala.net is one example and she does not link because she writes offline generally and uploads through a remote dialup) Which brings up a problem. The linkers tend to get linked hence viewed through that game of link tag that seems to be the living breathing currency of blogworld. How do we find and sustain these wonderful writers’ blogs, though? Will they give up? Does it matter? Is it link or die?

  2. Kris Hasson-Jones says:
    October 7, 2003 at 4:59 pm

    I remember when what we had were homepages. Then there was the journal movement, and now weblogs. It seems to me that we can choose to have categories with labels, or we can have communication problems. To me a web page about a person’s life and interests that has internal links but only few external ones is a homepage. A journal or diary is pretty obvious; it may contain occasional links to interesting stuff, but isn’t mostly about collecting the interesting stuff (links) you found on the web and want to share with and possibly comment on to your readers. That last thing, that’s quite obviously a blog.

    Why does it matter which category good writing comes in? Some classifications of fiction are genre and some are setting (that is, any kind of story can be told in a particular setting such as western or science fiction) and sometimes something is both or neither.

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