Experiments in delinkification

I'd be very interested to see time on page data for content with heavy linking, with sparse linking, and with no linking. My hypothesis is that time on page is inversely proportional to link density. Certainly, time on page doesn't necessarily equate to comprehension, but it could be a useful starting point.

Nick, I see that you're running Google Analytics, so you can measure this with precision. Please let us know if you see time on page increase with your new "endnote" link deferral method.

As always, a thought provoking post Nick. It could just be that it's memorial day and as such my feed reader is a tad less full than usual, but I did get the impression that my reading of your post was longer, more considered and that, at the end of it, I had a better notion of what you wanted to get across - sans hyperlinks.

Of course this means that Tim Berners-Lee will want to burn you at the stake but then again, that too would guarantee a few more book sales! ;-)

As someone who is active in the SEO industry, it would be interesting to find out how adding the links at the bottom of the page, as opposed to wrapping them in keywords in the text will affect your optimization.

I'm all for making it easier on the readers, but at what cost for your own page rank?

I dislike links as footnotes because it makes, in many cases, lazy writers. "It's too much work to source, so if you don't believe me, click here and check it yourself." When I write something, I'll use links, but I never assume that readers will click on them. It can be a pain in the ass adjusting the text to conform, but I feel better about myself.

So yes, having the links at the end of the post/article looks much, much better in my opinion.

"My own feeling, in reading these works, is that I much prefer the links at the bottom. I do find that the absence of links encourages more concentrated, calmer, and more enjoyable reading."

These were my exact feelings after reading Laura Miller's review of The Shallows last week on Salon. I didn't realize how distracting hyperlinks were until I read an article without them. Hopefully this link "format" can gain traction.

On a side note, I'm no software engineer, but what about designing a browser extension (say, for Google Chrome) that removes all hyperlinks and placed them at the bottom of an article? Would this be possible? Seems like a reasonable solution that I would welcome.

Reading on the internet allows our natural curiosity to get the better of us, consistently dragging us off task. When reading a book or a magazine article an idea may pop into your head, but to follow it through would require getting up and pulling another book off the shelf, or going to the library or bookstore to obtain the book i.e. a physical act that when weighed against the interest of what you are reading isn't attractive enough to pull you away. It's not that text in a book pulls harder, it's that it requires more effort to shift your focus than on the net. Never mind the hyperlinks embedded in online articles, on my mac it's simply three keystrokes to a new google search, in a new window, and a new focus. It requires a great deal more mental discipline to stay "on task" when reading on the net, not just because of the myriad distractions that are manifest in hypertext, but because the technology allows the ongoing distracting influence of our own thoughts to be acted upon.

What happens if the hyperlinks are where they logically should be (the word or phrase) but they are invisible and only show up if you "request" them, say with a mouseover? They would not be distracting unless you wanted to be distracted.

I've thought about this before, and I believe that the best solution to this problem is easily done with CSS and your blogging engine. Depending on how you link out of your post, the links would be hidden by styling them the same as the main text. If you wanted to see the links, a simple JS button would re-render everything with links being obvious.

I'm not sure if it would be better to show the links by default, or by option, but am I missing any reason that this wouldn't work?

I've got an even better idea, Nick -- why not just leave the links out altogether? That way we can concentrate on the brilliance and erudition of your prose instead of being lured away by some connection to the outside world.

Then once people get used to that, you can quit having comments too, just like Seth Godin -- like links, they just get in the way anyway, and muddy things up with other people's opinions. And who wants that?

Thanks for bringing this important issue to light.

Now that you mention it, Mathew, I can't say the links in your prose have ever bothered me. They kind of come as a relief.

as usual it's more about what you will do with technology then what you will do without. when well done technology hides itself.


CSS with:

.) links off/links on

.) hide/show list of links (+ open them in new tabs)

will do the job. (this is something which would be quite useful on mobile phones when thumb-scrolling.)



for most of the articles i use http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ extension. it
improves (w/ or w/o links) a reading experience a lot.

My blog, re: The Auditors, is very, very linky. In fact, I spend a lot of time choosing just the right link. Sometimes they're tongue-in-cheek or ironic. Makes it fun for me, like "easter eggs" in software. I consider my work to be reference material for my readers and, as such, am compelled to provide them all the sources for my facts and for most of my opinions and analysis. I do have a readership that is dominated by auditors, accountants, lawyers and regulators, so they're very picky about evidence and attribution. I also credit other writers often.

In spite of this, more than 22% of my readers spend more than one hour on the site each visit.

On the other, links provide us a way out to instantly escape some incoherent piece that demands more than what our brains can comprehend.

Wholeheartedly agree that the web turned 'focus' into a far more difficult discipline, still the onus is on the writer and his content.

How about something in between like Wikipedia's hyperlinked citations, so that the reader knows to which portion of the text, the reference corresponds?

There is content (C), there is call-to-action (A). What is your intention with an article like this one?

I assume, in this prioritization

C1 Let the user focus on your article.
A1 Sell your books.
A2 Provide navigation to related (own) posts.
A3 Provide links to related (foreign) posts.
C2 Provide the comment space (for reading and writing).

That's how you structure your page from upper left to bottom. A3 being the endnotes, end-of-text links - not inline links.

I think we can have different citation conventions for various online formats--just as we've long had distinct citation conventions across various modes of offline publishing. I don't see the need for links within the text of long reviews at the New York Review of Books or articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but I don't see anything especially strenuous about this post that requires quarantining all the links at the bottom.

My experience has been that anything this length or shorter actually benefits from having (appropriate) links as structural cues--part of the rhythm of the text, like punctuation and capitalization, subtly suggesting divisions and highlighting key elements.

And linking within pieces has become an essential part of how I cope with proliferating content. I wish we didn't have to cope with that problem, but we do, and I use links to make quick assessments of whether something is worth reading, i.e. by rolling over them to see if they refer to reputable sources, and if I recognize what's behind the link I can get a better sense of where an author is coming from based on what they've written about a shared point of reference.

I welcome your experiment, and I appreciate that different writers & readers have different styles, and some readers might take a little longer to learn strategies for dealing with distraction (like opening links in new tabs for later), but I don't see the need to impose such a presumptuous change (or rather, barrier) to evolving conventions.

I find links very helpful in making grand pronouncements which carry authority mainly by virtue of the links within the text.

Normally of course the links actually go to highschoolmusical.com or something similar, but of course 97.2% of readers never actually click through.

A hat tip to Brian above for his point too that it saves effort for scribblers: my average piece would be even longer than the 3000 words it usually is if I had to actually dot my I's and cross my T's on the same page.

Maybe I'm not being aware, but I don't find as distracting. I been "footnoting" all this time then because I command+click links so they open but don't take me away yet.

While I think this topic is something worth talking about, the thought of removing links or placing them at the end of an article to "Protect Us from Ourselves" is silly and elitist. There are greater dangers in the world to worry about than haphazard link-clicking.

Personally, I just right-click links and open them in a new tab while I continue reading the current article. Problem solved - without fancy plugins or sage advice from David Allen or Anthony Robbins. Frequently, I don't even return to those tabs for several hours. Sometimes my reaction is, "Don't care about that anymore - close." But often enough the reaction is, "Oh yeah, glad I didn't neglect to read that."

I don't think de-linking sources helps build your case when you're making an argument. I can tell whether or not an argument or a position has validity just by looking at what a person links to. I try to remain cognizant of the fact that, by linking to reputable news sources or reputable organizations, I'm making it easier for a reader to judge whether or not what I'm saying is based on something tangible.

The ethics of de-linking, well, who cares? If you want to make it harder for a reader, de-link away. Being "yanked" away by a link means this whole Internet thing is a little too advanced for you, I gather.

One of the things I like about Wikipedia is that the most useful links are those at the bottom. Yes, it has links throughout and they are sometimes helpful, but mostly a distraction. Yes, this is a hyperlinked medium, BUT the hyperlinks were meant to add value, not detract.

De-linking doesn't make it "harder" for a user. I mean, hell, anyone stupid enough not to know how to search for something is too stupid to be allowed to use the web anyway.

Now if we could only kill those stupid obfuscated URLs. And you you don't like that you can "bit.ly" my ass.

With just a slight note of sarcasm; would you provide a reference for hypertext studies you mention?

"People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form."

I would imagine the studies showed this to be true when 'constructing' certain types of knowledge and perhaps only from certain types of information. Without knowing which studies you're actually referring to (!) I would further suppose that they did not consider important social aspects of reading and interpreting such as trust and credibility. Of course, these aspects are often over-rated.

I like seeing the links in context, that is, within the post itself. Just because they seem similar to footnotes doesn't mean that we have to treat them like footnotes. We're presenting text in a whole different medium and we want to remain bound by rules that applied to the older medium? Why?

When I insert links, I try to position them behind keywords in the text, thus using the links to "highlight key elements", as one of the commenters said earlier. It's a way of saying: This is the point I'm trying to make; it's important!

Furthermore, readers can right-click on the link and open it in a new tab, whilst staying on the same tab to finish reading the text. I do that all the time and don't move on to the other links unless the page I'm reading is drivel or drop-dead boring. Since multi-tasking is now such an inescapable facet of online browsing and working at the computer, people have to learn how to manage all the various demands on their attention when they're sitting in front of the screen. If a writer's prose is not compelling enough to make readers read on, the lack of hyperlinks won't help much.

Everything has its purpose and I think putting the links at the bottom is a very good idea for longer texts that demand the full attention of the reader. Makes perfect sense.

Fstai,

Agreed. Lots of blog posts and other online writings (not to mention tweets) are intended largely as ways to point readers elsewhere or to highlight other pieces of writing or thinking. It would be silly not to include the links in the text in such cases.

Nick

It's interesting but by putting all the links at the end of a post you're actually training people to ignore your content.

Research shows that people very rarely read word for word. Instead they scan content. And one of the ways you can anchor users and ensure they're engaging with your content is ... links.

People aren't patient and while it would be nice if they were, I don't think that's going to change. Fighting against this instinct doesn't seem to be a winning strategy, nor is it entirely bad.

Different mediums dictate different styles. A novel versus a haiku versus grant writing. They're all very different in style, syntax and structure. Contextual links are simply a part of the style, syntax and structure of web content.

Unlink At Your Own Risk

Yes, I see the irony of putting my blog post link at the bottom of my comment.

It promotes bad writing.

Half way through your article I was bored and wanted to go to the CORE site.

If you were a better writer and put the meat in the window (didn't bury the lead), you'd have started with, "One way to force readers to read shitty writers online is to remove all the links... so that's what I'm going to do."

Yes, yes I know you take your own time to write these words, it is up to you to decide... blah blah.

You aren't doing anyone any favors by pretending we can't just just skim you to get the point, or see you TOTALLY miss the real point.

You aren't that deep, we can use the opportunity to get away from you. And since most of your readers are "one time shoppers" you OWE it to them, to put the knife in your own back and become a better writer.

Here's a hint: Far shorter paragraphs. It rewards the reader psychologically. Direct response writers have known this FOREVER. If you re-spaced this entire post never having a paragraph greater than 5 lines high, you'd get FAR MORE completes.

Trying to help!

Half way through your article I felt the need to skip to the end to see if you had provided a link to Laura Miller's article. You see, I've become accustomed to opening hyperlinks of interest in new tabs as I read articles online. I have to admit that there is a down-side to my approach; I end up having dozens of tabs open at the end of the day, waiting for my attention. (Wow, it feels strange to write more than 140 characters at a time!)

Huh? If u want 2provide in-context refs, then hyperlink. If not, then don't. Simple.

"UPDATE2: And now the king of the linkbaiters, Jeff Jarvis, accuses me of writing "that piece about links to get links." Yes, Jeff, whenever I write a post with the craven intent of harvesting a lot of links I always make a point of publishing it on the morning of Memorial Day."

Brilliant!

Nick,

just 3 things:

- could you please discuss this in context of Steven Johnson's "Interface Culture" chapter on hyperlinked writing?
- Ockham's Razor: cut all "brain science"-crap out. is something lacking? (i'd strongly argue: no. this brain/cognitivism-stuff applied to culture/semiosis is just making us dumber.)
- probably we should differentiate between 2 types of texts: one that is working better without links, and one that is depending on being hyperlinked. i'm not sure which one makes us smarter/dumber and would opt for the coexistence of both types.

Why don't we get rid of all links? Like the ads in the sidebar that link to your books. I know I could concentrate better if I didn't have to try to ignore the sidebar. Here's an idea, include a link at the *beginning* of the article that allows users to view a text-only version of the article. I support experimentation, but this one seems a bit disingenuous to me.

Craig, there are lots of studies of hypertext vs linear text dating back (at least) to the 80s. A good recent overview, which examines the results of about 40 studies, was published in 2007 in Computers in Human Behavior: DeStefano and LeFevre, "Cognitive Load in Hypertext Reading: A Review." Conclusion: "the increased demands of decision-making and visual processing in hypertext impaired reading performance," particularly when compared to "traditional linear presentation." Lots more citations in The Shallows.

Nick

Big ups to KK and Karlstrope above (click!), whose alternative should sap the last of anyone's endnote nostalgia.

Text is made of paths elsewhere. These paths summon anxiety, or as Kierkegaard would say, "the dizziness of freedom" to follow associations. The more I grasp an expressed idea, the more I feel the inadequacy of my grasp – while the cosmos of that idea bounds in so many directions at once, my thinking can't. Such is life.

Nick, if I judge Engelbart's 1962 "Augmenting Human Intellect" rightly, he would agree that links shouldn't jump out of text. Yet he recognized latent links in their full abundance. Words link to their broader uses; claims link to prior or forthcoming claims; figures of speech link to logical or playful relations; references link to outside texts. To him the job of computer-aided text was to enqueue as many links (and link kinds) at once as practical, invisibly, to be delivered at the speed of the viewer's curiosity.

Getting rid of links is like getting rid of references in a book. Links give articles credibility and show the depth of research by the author. Now making a decision to display embedded links obviously depends on the context. Who is your audience? What are you trying to achieve? So the decision to link or not to link is not one shoe fit all, obviously there are different scenarios and objectives. One solution would be to publish your links separately as an independent resource like http://www.kbucket.com. Your links can tell as much of a story as your article does. Linking is one of the main advantages of the web.

If only there was a way to get hyperlinks into printed books. It's so boring with all those words (on every page!) and no pictures and stuff. Oh, wait, I spoke too soon. A company called Ubimark "embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed." Cool! Here's a visual (pictures!) demonstration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE5Ch4NnVu0

I agree. Putting in links is a pain, but I do do it if I'm blogging someone's article otherwise at the end is better. I've also started using Pearltrees which is even better because it offers visual representation of the links in a post and also additional sites worth exploring.

You can see here: http://www.pearltrees.com/foremski/

Had the same thought as Kevin Kelly, Karlstrope, and Jason Treit - maintain the links in the body copy, but allow for simple user control by revealing them on mouse over/focus/etc. You could avoid the "learning curve" for users by keeping the summarized links at the bottom of the article/post, nofollow-ing one set of course.

But the only way for me to share this thought provoking article with my friends is by posting a link to it in my blog or Twitter account. Otherwise, my friends miss out on it and their ignorance compounds exponentially.

Damn,

My considered opinion is that if your communication consists of 140 characters or fewer, considerations of reader distraction need not enter into your calculations. Link away.

Nick

Too many links can be distracting (especially those awful Bing links on MSNBC for common entites that pop up on mouseover) but let's not over-rotate on link litter. Links allow people to experience what the web does well--make information webs, connect things, provide the option to drill in any relevant direction for another layer of info. As to studies that show cognitive issues with link litter, it may be that some pages are too rich with links but there is a whole generation of young people who are adept at filtering out noise and expect to be able to move quickly via gestures (swipe, for ex) and links to get the info they want.

dfarber,

I generally agree with you, except for the assumption that "there is a whole generation of young people who are adept at filtering out noise." The current evidence points in the opposite direction: the more time we spend zipping about the web and multitasking online, the less adept we become at filtering out noise. See Clifford Nass's work at Stanford, for instance. And that goes for young and old alike.

Also, there are deeper modes of thinking than "getting the info you want," but these are being pushed aside by the Net. Increasingly, we are limiting our intellectual lives to "getting info."

Nick

I find the impulse - is it a "reactionary" one - to remove the hyperlink perhaps historically parallel to those that felt that REAL writing was dis-served by illustrations in text, or even movable type. While I appreciate all the claims to cognitive yanking, the hyperlink works as one of the most dimensionally expansive ways of textually representing your thought. Certainly they are more than "footnotes". Footnotes move from book to book, essay to essay, and back, but hyperlinks provide landscapes, whole topologies of investigation, and if a reader is so undisciplined to not resist their pull, well...perhaps there are reading skills waiting to be discovered.

Hyperlinks need only be more quietly anchored, in text, perhaps. But not at the end. Putting such links in the foot is like putting the engine of the car only in the front because that was where the horses were.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot: http://mindsurgery.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/the-bookpage-versus-the-webpage/
Reading on a computer screen, my attention is splintered, and I tend to skim-read much more than I do with a printed page.
It seems to me that hyperlinks are only part of the phenomenon, though - it's also to do with the whole browser navigation system. When these days does anyone look at a single web page without other tabs open in the browser, and the email running in the background, and documents open, and twitter... and, on the desk alongside, a mobile phone, fixed phone, and every other mechanism of communication?
There's no such thing as single-mindedness, these days, I think.
Perhaps someone needs to invent an app that makes it impossible to multitask.
An anti-distraction plug-in?

"People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form" deserves (needs!) at least a footnote (but a hyperlink would have been much better). The phrase "studies show" always sets off alarm bells in my mind because it doesn't take much cleverness to design a "study" which will "show" just about anything. Regarding the issue in question, it would be easy to make up a document in which links are obstructive, but it seems that you have just demonstrated by example that it is equally possible to make one in which the absence of links is even more so (since I will not have been able to "comprehend" your post until I have had a chance to look at the sample documents used in those "studies").

Every so often, an article will come out in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times about how with digital media and digital devices, we will finally experience the multimedia revolution in education.

Is this revolution backwards and twisted? Will a digital revolution short circuit the brains of young learners? Is a print education "best"?

I've been pursuing this experiment with the articles I write for Salon by continuing to include any links to external sources in a final paragraph.

An interesting result of this practice is that in generating the text for that closing paragraph, I've had to include a little more information about the sources themselves -- i.e., "Here's an abstract for the study mentioned," and "Here's an article about the study that offers a little more detail." (Not all substantive research papers are posted online for free, by the way.) It's a bit more work, but I believe it offers more value to readers, too, since part of what I'm offering is an evaluation of the source.

Even more fascinating to see has been the response to this experiment. My readers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the change, but Web punditry seem to regard it as a kind of blasphemy. There's been hysterical exaggeration (pretending that the proposal is to eliminate external links entirely) and other misrepresentations, intentional or not, which surprise me in a community that's always presented itself as embracing change and flexibility. I wonder if the prospect of overturning a single longstanding tenet of the digital punditry is threatening because it undermines the prophetic powers of Web pundits as a whole (i.e., if they were wrong about this back in 1995, maybe they're wrong about other things today)? The whole discussion takes on the quality of a doctrinal war.

One addition question, re: people who don't feel that in-line links are an interruption because they open the source links in new tabs. Is this really so different from links at the end of the piece? I mean, if you're reading the main text all the way through, and then moving on to the linked sources through a series of tabs, then it's not as if you're retaining the original context of the link. You're simply reading a piece, then proceeding to its sources after you're done. If you've got a lot of tabs open, as many people seem to do, then chances are you don't remember *exactly* where the original link to it was, so why is it so important that it be embedded in the text?

When reading books, I much prefer footnotes on the bottom of the page than at the back. That way if you want to read them you can, as if they were written inline. And if you don't want to read them, just carry on as normal.

You don't have to consider a hyperlink a disruption of the linear reading process, any more than a phrase in parentheses is. Of course some hyperlinked text can be read in an in-line frame of mind better than others. It's up to the author of the original piece to choose carefully.

It's also useful to distinguish between classes of linked information. A (paper) author would consider carefully when to put text in parens, when to write it in full as a footnote, and when to simply cite another work.

For reference or factual work, links are still invaluable (although a decent search engine can semi-replace them). For more creative or abstract work, footnotes or traditional references may be a better mechanism

While your desire to streamline reading is a worthy goal, there may be compromise solutions that strike a better balance between deferred link following and preserving anchor context. See an FXPAL Blog post on hypertext anchors for more details.

Nick, I would love to hear your thoughts on this passage from George Siemens book, "Knowing Knowledge":

"Once flow becomes too rapid and complex, we need a model that allows individuals to learn and function in spite of the pace and flow. A network model of learning (an attribute of connectivism) offloads some of the processing and interpreting functions of knowledge flow to nodes within a learning network. Instead of the individual having to evaluate and process every piece of information, she/he creates a personal network of trusted nodes: people and content, enhanced by technology. The learner aggregates relevant nodes…and relies on each individual node to provide needed knowledge. The act of knowing is offloaded onto the network itself. This view of learning scales well with continued complexity and pace of knowledge development."

Perhaps, when one encounters a web page for the first time, the most valuable thing to do is situate it appropriately within one's personal network of information (e.g., through bookmarking, tagging) so that one can precisely and efficiently find it later when desired. Hyperlinks are a useful visual queue for quickly assessing the context of a web page within the broader web.

However, the skill to organize a web page within one's information network only has value if one also has the capacity to read the page with concentration in depth. In this mode, one is best reading in a cocoon, void of hyperlinks and without a keyboard. I've personally found the iPad valuable for this mode.

I really like this experiment. I actively try to minimise distractions while reading on the internet - using adblock addons and the like. I definitely see the links adding to cognitive load. And I'm quite tempted by an ereader for reading PDFs and longer web essays for exactly the reason of getting my mind into the text better, without distractions. And for less eye strain.

The delinkification experiment reminds of an unusual way of doing footnotes I've come across in "Le Ton beau de Marot" by Douglas Hofstadter (fascinating book by the way). He has a notes section at the end of the book, but does not have any indication in the main text that there are notes. In the notes section the references start with the page number and a few words to identify the bit of text the note is about. Here is his introductory paragraph at the start of the notes section:

In the hopes of providing a graceful alternative to the standard but often intrusive style of annotation through pedantic footnotes and text-disrupting citations, I have chosen to do things more "invisibly" here. I assume that readers will sense when a bibliographical reference is in order and will flip to this section; in addition they find it pleasant to browse herein, now and then discovering some amusing tidbit or curious embellishment.

There is an author who cares deeply about the reading experience.

If you are going to put links at the bottom, annotate them like a reference list. Another option is to not differentiate links from content unless the cursor is over the paragraph. That's simply some CSS (p:hover a{}).

Yes - let's remove the links from HTML (HyperText- the link part - Markup Language) documents. That makes perfect sense!

How is it that new-media writers are so clueless about how the underlying technology of what they are writing about works?

Hamhoagie: If you had bothered to read more than the title of the post, you might have spared yourself some agitation. No one said anything about removing links altogether. How is it that new media enthusiasts are so clueless about how the underlying technology of words work?

One additional question, re: people who don't feel that in-line links are an interruption because they open the source links in new tabs. Is this really so different from links at the end of the piece?

Laura, that's a very good question. My answer, like yours, is No. Also, it's not like left-clicking on a link to save it in a tab solves the underlying distraction problem.

KellyRoberts - Thanks for the quick update. I did read the article, and the entire premise was flawed, which, had you an understanding of what HTML actually was, you would have understood. The basis of the web, which is HTTP, and HTML, are the links - the very definitional terms of the Web. The links contextually within the content is a feature, not a bug. In fact, the term "hypertext" was initially coined by Ted Nelson as a connective idea:




"As he considered the design of this system, Nelson applied his experience as a filmmaker with the conception of complex motion picture effects, moving from one shot to another, and conceived of the idea of hypertext. He became profoundly convinced of the enormous value of such a system[.]" (do you see what I did there with the link thing?)




Why is it that new media types think that because they have an idea of how the web should work, that others who "invented" the technologies or concepts haven't already thought it out?

Nick, I think your recommendations make a lot of sense for anyone trying to write an argument.

(Interestingly, all of the long pitch sales copy guys have adopted this technique many years ago and continue to thrive on internet.)

What would be interesting to is serve up the linked and non linked version, in an A/B test, and figure out how comprehension was changed.

Look forward to reading your book, as this is a very important topic.

(Oh, and it is mean to dull your rapier wit on Matthew Ingram.)

I wrote a short article about this concept way back in 2001, mostly as a response to my own findings in the cognitive disruption I'd experience when reading a page full of inline links (see http://www.inovdesigns.com/inline_links.php). I just couldn't stay focused on the main article; always wondering what I might be missing in those links. Now, I'm a middle-click junky, essentially opening up most of the related links in new browser tabs as I read along, just in case there's more for me to read.

I think a bigger problem is people who seem to be unable to organize the ideas in short, coherent messages -- instead, many people meander through a multitude of long and winding paths that end up leaving the reader in a mesmerized state of delirium.

On a related note, what do these phases mean?

1. Salon review

2. Neuorethics at the Core post

3. Standage's tweeted chortle

4. The Shallows site

See also http://news.english.net.in/33/the-wisdom-of-the-html-the-difference-between-the-link-and-the-url (unfortunately also not exactly as concise as I wish it could be ;) )

WOW! It's amazing how one Wired Mag article, about "The Shallows" is altering my life; online and off.

Huge number of revelations about how my naturally high level of distractiblity is multiplied by skimming and the anxious compulsion to find out what's behind click (door) #3.

Reading interviews, reviews, and comments has opened up a wide range of views and ideas on the topic by many people much more knowledegeable than I.

Finally, the READABILITY application is exactly what I had thought of, but hadn't a clue as how to even start. Thank you ARC090!

Please visit my blog which attempts to personalize how The Shallows affects my life, in an attempt to help myself and others; http://www.velorep.com/b2b-blog/bid/33398/Internet-Multi-Taskers-Beware-you-could-be-harming-your-brain

Putting links at the end means I can (a) check the credibility of sources all at once, (b) find them without searching through every hyperlinked "this" and "that", and (c) read the biblography before the body. I approve. ...Mind you, I'm also one of those perverts who prefers footnotes to end-notes and maintains that quality is more important than quantity. I clearly have no place in the SEO-driven graphical linkonomy 2.0.

You might be interested to look into the book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It has the most aggressive footnoting I have ever seen and in some ways mimics the experience of reading a heavily hyperlinked website.

I'm amused by those who think we must design sites to follow the largely hidden rules of SEO.

The rules of SEO are merely an attempt to better recognize which information on a topic is more valid and more valuable than others. Just a few years ago, you could tune the meta data of your site so terms never used in your pages or in links to your pages would nonetheless, when used in a search, make your site rise to the top of the list.

People started abusing that ability. In response, Google — and presumably other search-engine providers — changed its SEO rules. They now ignore meta data.

If the maintainers of authoritative sites change the way they link to other sites, the search engines will follow. Their purpose is not to tell us how to present information effectively. Their purpose is to lead people who need the information we provide to our sites.

seriously... i think i agree with the stick links at the bottom of the info. i had more to say but it would be more repetition :)

I don't believe text with lots of links in it is automatically more authoritative; I tend to read text the same way whether it is on a screen or printed on paper. There are various ways of evaluating the accuracy and authority of text. If you are expanding on ideas in someone else's article then a reference (if on-line, a link) is certainly warranted. If we are voting I'll vote for putting them at the end.

Distraction can be a problem in modern life. I sometimes like to print something out so I can curl up in a comfy chair with it and read it as though it were a book or magazine. This helps my thought process. Words themselves have multifarious links in our own memories which may echo in a more harmonious fashion, so to speak, in isolation, i.e. off-line.

I'm a bit mystified by some folks' declarations of dependence on these links--it seems to me that search engines work so well that links are hardly even needed. For example, if I wanted to share this article with friends, I could simply mention a few bare facts such as author's name and the subject of the article ("links") and my readers could Google it themselves. (I've tried this; it works.)

On the other hand, links are great for articles or other items that are hard to find. It just bothers me when people lose faith in their own minds. Intelligent conversation devolves into a game of electronic ghost-tag. Let's talk, instead. Thanks for reading.

Great article.

To be completely honest, I was completely skeptic when I started reading your article. Now that you mentioned it, I can't argue anything you have put out. Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I've read a 5-6 page blog without getting distract-**ooh shiny link!

"I should have joined up instead of mocking it." Dude, they're not opposites, you can do both.

I found your post interesting for a few paragraphs. Then all that black text with no shiny gadgets, pictures, or blue links to break it up lost me. Links wake me up. Even when I write e-mails to co-workers I never write more than a few sentences without bolding some words and phrases. Maybe you have the last few humans with discipline and an attention span. The rest of us need to use things like Links to liven up the post. No, great writing isn't enough, at least not for most of us.

I love it, Nicholas. For a blogger/writer as highly established as Steve Gillmor, he risks little doing an experiment like this, as compared with someone like me with a few thousand (extremely valued!) subscribers. For us others, "link love" is an important way to create importance in the ever-crucial Google search indexes. I'm not sure I'd take a chance.

I'm creating a philosophy of life based on the scientific method where you treat everything as an experiment (I'm calling it Think, Try, Learn), and the one you mention is a nice experiment idea for others to try. Here a are a few other random blog-related ones I can think of:

o Write many short posts with pictures (traditional blog style).
o No-picture blogs.
o Picture-only.
o Write few long essays (what I'm guilty of).
o Try stream-of-consciousness a few times.
o Tell an out-of-character personal story.
o Ask readers to guest post.
o Ask someone famous you respect a one-question email interview.

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