{"id":581,"date":"2006-11-14T08:52:37","date_gmt":"2006-11-14T15:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=581"},"modified":"2006-11-14T08:52:37","modified_gmt":"2006-11-14T15:52:37","slug":"links_arent_mes_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=581","title":{"rendered":"Links aren’t messy anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Hyperlinks,” David Weinberger wrote<\/a> in the Cluetrain Manifesto, “subvert hierarchy … Hyperlinks have no symmetry, no plan. They are messy.”<\/p>\n

I found those words through – surprise – a hyperlink. And I found that link, via another link, on Doc Searls’s blog, where today he writes<\/a>, as I wrote<\/a> yesterday, on Ted Leonsis’s strategy<\/a> of using a blog to manipulate what people see when they google his name. I had called Leonsis’s strategy Machiavellian, and asserted it ran counter to the conversational ethic of the cluetrainers. Searls agrees, and disagrees: “Ted is being both Machiavelli and<\/em> Cluetrain compliant. (It isn’t like the guy isn’t<\/i> getting clues, is it? He’s not bunkered down in what Dr. Weinberger aptly called Fort Business.)”<\/p>\n

The Cluetrain Manifesto was written at the end of the 90s, and it catches and reflects the spirit of that heady time. Back then, the hyperlink did feel like a subversive tool, a virtualized and more subtle version of a Molotov Cocktail. There didn’t seem to be much symmetry or plan to linking. It was<\/em> messy – a free-for-all. And for those of us who aren’t fond of bureaucracies or artificial hierarchies, it was liberating. Or, at least, fun.<\/p>\n

But can we still say that hyperlinks subvert hierarchies, that they have neither symmetry nor plan? I think Doc Searls needs to look a little more closely at what Leonsis’s blog strategy is telling us. He was able to control the conversation, to get the content he wanted to the top of Google’s results, through a simple, three-pronged strategy for attracting links: use his position as a leading business executive to gain attention, use his meetings with celebrities to gain attention, and use links to popular bloggers to gain attention. Leading business executive, celebrities, popular bloggers: This is entirely about using social or professional hierarchies to manipulate hierarchies of information. It’s about understanding the plan and the symmetry that have come to define – not entirely, but in large part – the flow of information on today’s PageRanked web. It’s about seeing the structure in the mirage of messiness. It’s about being “clued in,” though not at all in the cluetrainers’ sense of that phrase.<\/p>\n

What Leonsis is doing, in short, is working the system. And isn’t that what climbing and controlling hierarchies have always been about?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Hyperlinks,” David Weinberger wrote in the Cluetrain Manifesto, “subvert hierarchy … Hyperlinks have no symmetry, no plan. They are messy.” I found those words through – surprise – a hyperlink. And I found that link, via another link, on Doc Searls’s blog, where today he writes, as I wrote yesterday, on Ted Leonsis’s strategy of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}