To link or not to link… that is the argument

Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 9:57 am. 0 comments

You can generally rely on Robert Scoble to stir up a little discussion in the blogosphere - if I didn’t know better, I’d think he enjoys being the centre of attention!  This time it’s about the Big Boys in the tech blogosphere and the perception that they don’t link out to other, smaller sites.  Whether or not Robert is right - and his comments are full of vitriol in both directions - it’s good that the topic has been brought up; plenty of people criticise sites like Engadget and Gizmodo for the amount that they do and don’t refer people onwards. 

Information crediting is always going to raise tempers.  SlashGear is certainly smaller than either Engadget or Gizmodo (though we’re growing every month), and yet we have our fair share of credit upsets.  Sometimes it’s because people assume we read news at their site, and yet have pointed the via link elsewhere; sometimes it’s our own content (images or text that’s obviously been lifted from our site) that gets rehashed elsewhere with no link back to us.  While I’m sure we get fewer tips than the headline sites do, there’s still a regular flow of links sent in; as Ryan from Engadget says, we all make editorial decisions over whether those submissions should make our front-page.  Are the tipsters pissed if we don’t use their ideas?  Probably so.

The root of it is pride, I think; pride in the words, pictures and video we produce and pride in the amount of research we have to do beforehand.  Anyone who puts their work online is saying “look, this is my opinion” and to be told - through lack of response - that it’s not interesting or unique enough to feature is a slap in the face.  I still have a hiccup of pleasure when I see a SlashGear article linked to on another site; the message is that I was either the first to talk about it or that I said something noteworthy enough to get picked up.  There are thousands of tech blogs out there and so you need to stand out somehow, whether that be by specialising in a particular topic, getting more news-breaks than anyone else or having an engaging writing style.

Incidentally, did I link to Robert’s video of Intel’s new 45nm chip fabrication plant?  No, although I meant to… and then IE7 crashed and all the “blog about this” tabs went with it.  Sorry Robert, though if you want to help you could speak to your old colleagues and get them to sort out their missing-in-action Session Saver!