Charlie P always hits me up with great links, this one he dropped in my delicious was an interesting read. A chap from Auntie with a long job title (incorporating the word 'multimedia' no less) said the other day that linking out from bbc.co.uk is a 'vital' future development. This is apparently in part due to the BBC Trust being disappointed with referrals from the Beeb in a review they conducted. The trial the BBC conducted in August wasn't impressive, they still seemed overly concerned with keeping people on site. This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that major newspaper sites weren't good web citizens. They behave like black holes, you can see a huge number of links being sucked in, indicating the presence of a major hub. If you follow one of those links you won't escape once you're inside, you'll be forever trapped looking at their content and no one else's, a significant chunk of it informed by stuff happening elsewhere on the web that they won't reference properly. This makes for a less relevant web experience for the visitor and is thus a bad thing. I'd be interested in seeing how people start behaving if this policy gets properly implemented at the BBC. As I've stated my philosophical position is that you should link in a relevant way as often as you can as this gives people the opportunity to explore a topic further and helps the search engines figure out what we think is important to that topic, helping the accuracy of future searches. Whether people actually do engage in active exploration by following external links as much as is sometimes claimed is something I've been giving thought to recently. I'm going to leave this for a future post, maybe if I can get some data to work through to draw conclusions from. If nothing else one can always look to one's own experience; in my case I read a lot of content in situ on my favourite blogs I arrive at directly and rarely follow off-site links. It's only when I'm pursuing a line of inquiry I behave in a way that exploits the network of links that exists between pages of content.