Indirect link sharing Oct30 '07
Indirect link sharing: Link to the source, not someone else's interpretation of the source.
I'm becoming quite tired of being linked to someone else's opinion of the source, rather than the source itself.
An example is a recent post on Daring Fireball, which is titled, Jackass of the Week: NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker.
Upon clicking through the link for this post, I am taken not to the source article (which is what I want to see), but rather, another person's opinion of the same topic. Contained within this second article, I am lucky to find the link to the real source.
However, Daring Fireball did point this out to avoid misleading readers:
NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker claims Apple destroyed the music business in terms of pricing. As John Paczkowski points out, the going rate for digital downloads pre-iTunes was zero. ...
Clearly we see the link is to another person's opinion, rather than the source itself.
On Digg
This is a good reason why I never felt too attached to Digg. It's that complete disconnection from the source content that slows me down. I don't need to see Digg users' opinion of the content, I just want to see the content!
Many folks on Twitter will share a link, but instead of supplying the source URL, they supply Digg's reference to the source URL. It's that extra step that wastes a lot of my time.
Multiply the amount of content that I read on weekly basis - if I had the "Digg middle man" in between each link, it would severely cripple my productivity. Following trails of links to the source is not how I like to spend my time.
Categories: Blogging 
, Links , Rants
Add Feedback (view all)
Leave feedback
is published and produced by Matt Thommes - an independent publishing enthusiast, mobile blogger, content creator, informative writer, web developer from Chicago.
Never one to conform, Matt intends to promote the effect the web has on our lives, in an effort to intensify, instruct, and clarify all that is happening around us.
Similar Entries
- Firefox custom link styles? (91 recent visits)
- Misleading CSS link declarations (8 recent visits)
- CSS link declaration efficiency (21 recent visits)
- San Diego link dump (1 recent visits)
- Text link ads are advertisements (0 recent visits)
- Selecting text within a link (1 recent visits)
Stats
4 unique visits since August 2008
Matt, good points. But of course in the blogosphere, the Opinion frequently is the Content. In some cases, rightly so, but m ... Read more.