I recently argued that the proliferation of self-links (like that one you just passed) on prominent sites and blogs is one of the factors that has made hyperlinks less useful in determining search results and, in general, in sorting, filtering, and evaluating the content of the web. A link is most valuable, in this regard, when it is an expression of an individual’s informed judgment — unbiased by self-interest — about the value and importance of content on the web. As many have pointed out, when links are used in this way they serve as “votes” about the quality or importance of web pages. But as the intent of links has shifted, particularly on popular commercial sites, away from expressing personal judgment and toward pursuing personal or institutional interest (boosting page views, ad impressions, or search rankings, for instance, or even simply using your own or your colleagues’ past work to provide context to readers), the utility of links as democratic votes on the value of web content has been reduced. That doesn’t mean that all self-links, or “internal links,” as they’re often called, are bad — they’re frequently appropriate and helpful — but when they are used routinely, as they tend to be today, they make links in general less valuable as a means of filtering and navigating the web.

A new paper by Mark Coddington, a journalism grad student at the University of Texas, shows just how dominant a practice internal linking is among top journalism sites. (I found the paper via a Poynter story, which I found via an Andrew Sullivan link.) Coddington examined the links in a sample of stories from three types of journalism sites: news sites run by big media companies, blogs written by journalists at big media companies (“j-blogs”), and popular independent news blogs. He found that 91% of the links in the stories on the news sites were internal links (pointing to other pages on the same site), and that 54% of the links in the j-blog stories were internally directed. In contrast, only 18% of the independent bloggers’ links were internal links. I’ve termed the practice of inward linking “nepotistic linking”; Sullivan uses the more memorable term “linksturbation.”

Coddington also measured the percentage of links in the stories that pointed to “mainstream media” sites. On the news sites, fully 93% of links go to mainstream media sites. For j-blogs, the figure is 77%, and for indies, the figure is 33%. As Coddington observes, the overwhelming tendency of mainstream media sites to link to mainstream media sites tends to concentrate authority on the web. Whereas links once served to broaden the conversation, they increasingly serve to narrow it. Coddington, who supplemented his analysis with interviews with journalists, notes that

those within news organizations overwhelmingly expressed philosophies of openness regarding the sources of their links. They placed very few restrictions on what types of sources they would link to, and they were emphatic about their willingness to link both outside of their news organizations, and outside of traditional media sources. As we have seen and will examine further, however, these linking philosophies have yet to be borne out in the actual linking practices of mainstream news organizations, particularly outside of their blogging content.

The sites are open in theory, but largely closed in practice. Blogs once provided a counterforce to such homogenization, but as personal blogs have been displaced by commercial ones (in terms of traffic) over the last seven years, the blogosphere has come to amplify the insularity effect. As Coddington’s study suggests, institutional bloggers are far more likely to link inwardly and to link to mainstream sites than are independent bloggers.

Although Coddington notes that “links can wield immense power to define the parameters of an online text and the Web itself,” the focus of his research is on journalism, in particular how links serve to shape news reporting and hence “frame” public perceptions. He sums up his findings this way:

I always knew that a day would come when I would have to write that headline.

It has come.

Following up on my recent WSJ piece on how the path of innovation seems to follow the path of our own desires — toward, recently, “tools of the self” — here is an interview I did yesterday with Jian Ghomeshi on CBC Radio’s Q show.

University of Denver librarian Michael Levine-Clark argues that libraries should scrap their interlibrary loan (ILL) services and loan out ebooks instead. “ILL is amazing, a wonderful service,” he writes, but “it doesn’t make much sense in a world of digital collections.” My heart sank as I read that. While I can testify — and I’m speaking here as a library patron, not as a librarian — that ILL is both amazing and wonderful, I think he’s way off base in arguing that e-copies can replace original, physical books. [UPDATE: Actually, it appears that I’m the one who’s off base; see Levine-Clark’s clarifying comment below.]

For the past ten years, I’ve worked as a freelance writer in, successively, a small New England town, a small town in the West, and a small city in the West. I had no access to a research library in any of those places. What I did have was access to excellent online ILL systems. I could search for books and journal articles, order copies of ones I needed from dozens of public and academic libraries, and then pick them up at my local library branch. In some cases an electronic copy of the material would have been fine. In most cases, though, the physical book was essential. Some of the reasons have to do with the limited availability of electronic versions of many books. The ability to specify, in an ILL request, a particular edition of a book can be very important. It might be argued that this limitation will eventually be remedied by further scanning efforts and improvements in metadata, but eventually can take a long time to arrive. There’s also the problem of variability in ebook formats, interfaces, and quality. (My current public library offers immediate online access to some books and journal articles. The system is agonizingly slow and clunky, to the point where I now always bypass it and request a physical copy.) This, too, is a technical limitation and may be resolved at some point in the future. But it will be a limitation for a long time, and overcoming it will not be cheap or easy.

More fundamental, though, is the fact that, particularly when it comes to research, a book and an ebook are not the same thing. An ebook has certain advantages, such as the ability to do a full-text search (particularly valuable for books that don’t have indexes), but it also has disadvantages. It’s much easier to navigate printed pages than screen images — flipping backwards and forwards, jumping between lots of marked passages, skimming quickly, and so on — and it’s much, much easier to jump among several print books than to do the same thing with e-books. It’s important to note that, as most people move away from desktop computers with big screens and toward portable devices with small screens, the ebook’s navigational disadvantages are magnified, not reduced. (I discussed the shortcomings of ebooks for research more fully in an earlier post reporting on research into why students are often frustrated by e-textbooks.)

Levine-Clark points out that inter-library loans are fairly expensive transactions. (Though I think he exaggerates the cost a bit by drawing from a chart in a recent study in which the authors exclude cheaper, automated transactions that are made possible by online systems.) But costs have been coming down steadily, and ILL remains a wonderfully efficient way to allow a library to expand its collection without having to purchase books and other items that are used only rarely. And as libraries continue to prune their print collections, drawing on a pool of collections becomes ever more important. ILL also opens the collections of university research libraries to the patrons of public libraries, many of whom (like me) can’t borrow directly from the research libraries. And it allows people without computers, or with older machines that aren’t able to make use of modern web services, to borrow an extraordinary range of books and other materials. (Speaking for myself, I would be happy to pay a fee for an inter-library loan in order to help defray the cost. That seems only fair, given the budget constraints libraries are under.)

Maybe, in the end, ILL programs will have to be killed off to save money. I just hope that, in making such a decision, we remain conscious of what will be lost as a result. I think Levine-Clark gets it wrong in saying that ILL “doesn’t make much sense in a world of digital collections.” I believe it makes more sense than ever.

The New Yorker’s Ian Crouch has a post about the insidious, inexorable spread of advertising into public spaces. He mentions the recent decision by a town in Indiana to sell naming rights to its fire hydrants in order to raise cash. The hydrants now carry garish ads for KFC Fiery Grilled Wings. Crouch notes that we seem to be fulfilling a dark dream of many science fiction writers, who conjured up a future in which “advertising becomes more pervasive, consumer culture supplants traditional culture, and language itself, from place names to common nouns, is subsumed by the things we buy and sell.”

We’ve been heading in this direction for a while. Crouch’s article reminded me of an essay about the arrival of electric light at the turn of the last century by Carolyn Marvin, which was collected in the excellent 1986 compilation Imagining Tomorrow. As light bulbs proliferated, an illumination mania ensued. A startup called the Electric Girl Lighting Company went into business renting out “illuminated girls” for parties: “Young women hired to perform the duties of hostesses and serving girls while decked out in filament lamps were advertised to prospective customers as ‘girls of fifty-candle power each in quantities to suit householders.'”

Companies became enthralled by the extravagant advertising opportunities opened by electric light. “A common device,” writes Marvin, “was the ‘sky sign,’ which spelled out the name of a firm or promotional slogan or outlined an image against the blank wall of a building.” Projectors, or “magic lanterns,” were also used to project messages onto buildings or windows. But that was just the beginning. Advertisers soon realized they could create literal “sky signs” — promotional messages projected on the firmament. This became popularly known, around 1890, as “advertising on the clouds.” Using technology developed by a General Electric engineer, a huge projector was erected on top of the tallest building in New York City in 1892. “It had an illumination of some 1,500,000 candles, and it weighed well over 3,000 pounds. An 8-inch lens projected stencil-plate slides of figures, words, and advertisements upon the clouds.”

Some were appalled by the prospect of seeing the night sky covered with ads. A writer in a British journal observed, “A poet, in one of his rhapsodies, said that he would like to snatch a burning pine from its Norway mountains and write with it the name of ‘Agnes’ in letters of fire on the skies. But he would probably have not cared to adorn the firmament with a blazing description of somebody’s patent trouser-stretcher, or a glowing picture, as large as Bedford Square, of a lady viewing the latest thing in corsets.”

Another writer lamented that the “the clouds are to be turned into hideous and gigantic hoardings.” The “awful invention,” he went on, “deprives us of the last open space in the world on which the weary eye might rest in peace without being agonized by the glaring monstrosities wherewith the modern trademan seeks to commend his wares.” As it turned out, advertisers would go on to discover all sorts of virgin “open spaces” in the world that could be covered with ads. Thanks to the ever-multiplying terrestrial, and now virtual, placement opportunities, the heavens, for the time being, have been spared.

If you want to send an anticopyright activist to the heights of dudgeon just refer to the unauthorized downloading of a copyrighted work as an act of theft. You’ll immediately get a lawyerly earful about how, in order to have a theft, you not only have to have a guy who swipes a piece of property but you also have to have another guy who loses the property. If you grab a bike that doesn’t belong to you, the owner of the bike no longer has the bike. That’s theft. If you download a copy of a song without paying for it from a file-hosting service or a peer-to-peer network, you haven’t shut off anybody else’s access to that song. So: no loss, no theft.

And that does seem to be a pretty accurate reading of the law. As Rutgers law professor Stuart Green recently wrote:

From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and tangible. For Caveman Bob to “steal” from Caveman Joe meant that Bob had taken something of value from Joe — say, his favorite club — and that Joe, crucially, no longer had it. Everyone recognized, at least intuitively, that theft constituted what can loosely be defined as a zero-sum game: what Bob gained, Joe lost.

Of course, for a long time there wasn’t anything much to filch other than physical goods — Caveman Joe didn’t have many MP3s stashed in his cave — so you might argue that the narrow definition of “theft” reflects an arbitrary distinction left over from history. Still, as Green goes on to argue, it’s not a bad idea to keep terms precise when you’re dealing with definitions of crimes:

[…] we should stop trying to shoehorn the 21st-century problem of illegal downloading into a moral and legal regime that was developed with a pre- or mid-20th-century economy in mind […] This is not merely a question of nomenclature. The label we apply to criminal acts matters crucially in terms of how we conceive of and stigmatize them. What we choose to call a given type of crime ultimately determines how it’s formulated and classified and, perhaps most important, how it will be punished.

That strikes me as entirely reasonable, probably even wise. Green isn’t blessing the unauthorized copying of someone else’s creation — he still places it in the general category of “criminal acts” — but he is saying that it’s a different type of offense than theft and deserves to be evaluated and punished differently:

Illegal downloading is, of course, a real problem. People who work hard to produce creative works are entitled to enjoy legal protection to reap the benefits of their labors. And if others want to enjoy those creative works, it’s reasonable to make them pay for the privilege. But framing illegal downloading as a form of stealing doesn’t, and probably never will, work. We would do better to consider a range of legal concepts that fit the problem more appropriately: concepts like unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation.

That, too, seems entirely reasonable. But if we’re going to be precise in our use of the term “theft,” as I think we should be, we should also strive to be precise in our use of another word that’s flung around sloppily in discussions of digital copying: “sharing.” In a piece posted yesterday (responding to Emily White’s now famous article about her music-copying habits), Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman played the don’t-call-it-theft card in discussing the large-scale, unauthorized uploading and downloading of songs. So what does Stallman think we should call it? Misappropriation? Trespass? Unauthorized use? No. We should, he says, call it “sharing.” Calling it sharing puts a happy face on the practice, just as calling it theft puts a sad face on it. It’s the kind of word that short-circuits discussion, runs roughshod over subtleties:

Copying and sharing recordings [is] not a mistake, let alone wrong, because sharing is good. It’s good to share musical recordings with friends and family; it’s good for a radio station to share recordings with the staff, and it’s good when strangers share through peer-to-peer networks. The wrong is in the repressive laws that try to block or punish sharing. Sharing ought to be legalized; in the mean time, please do not act ashamed of having shared — that would validate those repressive laws that claim that it is wrong.

Sharing doesn’t scale quite so easily as Stallman pretends, at least not without twisting the word’s meaning. Sharing is an intimate act, a human act, and we’ve always sensed that it describes an act of generosity between people who are connected in some meaningful, tangible way: friends and family, for instance, or neighbors, or coworkers. If you try to stretch the meaning of sharing to cover anonymous, large-scale exchanges, you distort the word; you lose its essence. Sharing isn’t a transaction in a marketplace or a transfer of data among nodes in a network. The motivations and the consequences of a person uploading some band’s new album to a file-hosting site so that millions of strangers can grab free copies are different from the motivations and the consequences of a person making a copy of that same album for a friend. I find it hard to see much wrong with the latter act, and I find it hard to see much right with the former. In any case, to term them both sharing — and then proclaim “sharing is good” — is to try, through an act of semantic and ethical gimmickry, to erase important distinctions and to try to shut off an important debate.

If we can stop shouting “theft” and “sharing” about an act that is neither, maybe we can open the way for a grand compromise — one that liberalizes our currently onerous copyright laws and widens the scope of fair use while also respecting and protecting the work and the rights of artists.

I was whining a while back about Apple’s decision, as part of its shift from MobileMe to iCloud, to get rid of its iDisk service for cloud storage and syncing. I’d been using iDisk more or less happily for years — since the olden iTools days — so it was a nuisance to see it discontinued. But that’s life in the cloud. Anyway, I thought I’d report back on my choice for a replacement. After weighing the many choices in cloud storage, I ended up going with Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The deciding factor was pretty simple: SkyDrive offers the most free storage capacity (7 GB). Google Drive gives you 5 GB, and Dropbox gives you a measly 2. I’m also pretty confident in the reliability and security of Microsoft’s cloud system, and Microsoft, so far, seems less nosy than Google.

After a month, I’m happy. My main interest is simply to sync key files between computers and to have cloud backup for those files, and SkyDrive is working fine. (In fact, it’s been considerably less intrusive than iDisk.) I only ran into one problem: For some reason, no doubt Windows-related, SkyDrive won’t accept files that have certain characters in their names (like colons and quotation marks and slashes). That was a trivial issue for me – I just had to tweak the names of about a dozen files – but for some people it might be a pain in the neck. SkyDrive also has a limit on the length of file names, but none of my files hit the limit.

The good thing about cloud storage is that it’s painless to switch from one service to another, so if something goes awry with SkyDrive, or a better option pops up, I’ll jump somewhere else. I’ve had a Dropbox account for a long time and continue to use it for sharing files. I also have Google Drive and Amazon Cloud Drive accounts. They’re free, so what the hey.