So I'm reading this article from The Independent about mountaintop removal mining, another man-made horror inflicted on our shared environment, and read the following:

"Another way to see what's going on behind the ridge-line is to take a Google Earth virtual tour of an online memorial to the 470 mountains blown up and levelled in recent years."

I'd like to check this out but there isn't a link to it. Finding the relevant site wasn't a problem, I did a Google search and the site ilovemountains.org was the top result. The content on here appears to tally with what the article is discussing. Okay, I've found what I was looking for but there is a reason to get annoyed about having to take an extra step and it isn't just to do with laziness. Links are what make the web work. They give content a structure I can follow and allow me to interact with this content in all sorts of different ways. They also enable the web to be searchable so I can find other relevant pages. By not linking out The Independent is delivering a poor user experience and impairs my ability to easily investigate the topic further, which, given the fact I'm giving the article my attention, I may well want to do. What makes this policy of not linking out cynical is that the article gives me the option to 'Digg It', bookmark it in del.ico.us, share it via my Facebook profile and add it to Stumbleupon. The Independent would very much like me to promote their article for them via social sharing in order to gain the attention of further visitors. When it comes to sharing the attention itself however it's a different and more selfish story.

4 original comments:

[...] meaning to post on this for a while… now Mark H. has gawn done it, with this incisive observation on how annoying it is when websites insist on treating themselves as a final destination rather [...]
Pingback by hackbash » Blog Archive » Down with the news cul-de-sac — 29 May, 2008 @ 9:34 am

This is great Mark – can we shame them into a link rethink?
Comment by cpev — 29 May, 2008 @ 9:39 am

Agree – especially with your point in the last paragraph.
Your post stimulated Charlie into action on Hackbash. I added this comment:
Couldn’t agree more – it’s been on my list of Things to Complain About too, but I’m giving it a rest for the moment. I can only assume that papers are still struggling to move on from simply presenting information, and that they feel that embedding links will encourage people to go elsewhere.
I’d humbly offer this quote:
"When writing directly for the web, make sure that you insert any outward links around the appropriate words within your body copy, rather than in a side panel or at the bottom."
from my Press Gazette article on SEO for journalists. Ironically, PG didn’t publish inline links at the time, so it ended up looking stupid.
Another (probably worse given its target market) example is Computer Shopper. They’ve started putting inline links into their news stories (hallelujah!), but articles written for the magazine still aren’t transferred onto the website with inline links. It wouldn’t matter so much, but Dennis employs hateful Vibrant inline adverts.
If we’re all agreed that failing to put in relevant links is a disservice to your readers, then failing to do so but remembering to put in shit adverts is taking the piss out of them.
Comment by handolio — 31 May, 2008 @ 11:39 am

[...] is exactly what I was talking about when I said that major newspaper sites weren’t good web citizens. They behave like black [...]
Pingback by markhigginson.com/blog » The event horizon… — 2 November, 2008 @ 8:44 pm