A great comment posted on this story about work uniforms at The Guardian. Linking is really simple. Do it often, and do it to relevant sources.
“Please, please, please can these blogs stop including idiotic hyperlinks? The Transport Salaried Staffs Association is presumably a recognised body and should warrant its own link, which would be considerably more useful than picking out the word ‘transport’ to link to that section of the Guardian’s own website. Might seem like a minor point but these links are too often virtual non-sequiturs that display little understanding of where readers might want to be taken. Please tell me they are generated automatically by some crap software rather than painstakingly added by an actual person.
Ahh, feels better to have got that no-doubt pointless rant off my chest.”
Some discussion on Twitter
- Craig McGinty retweeted the link to this story, and added that “the Guardian can’t even link to Friends Reunited when the article is all about it.”
- C.K. Sample III said this “sounds suspiciously like the linking techniques of a site that starts with eng and ends with adget.” Through my amazing skills of deduction, I’ve determined that he’s talking about Engadget. Only thing I’d say in response, is that at least they always link to the source of the story! That would be a pretty decent (and easy) principle for newspapers to adopt.
- Leon Green over at Pickled Politics.com agrees with the commenter, and says “it’s bloody annoying the way the G doesn’t do inline linking properly.” True dat.
C.K. Sample III | 18-Feb-09 at 6:06 am | Permalink
Yes, Engadget always links to the source, but only via the Read link. All the other links in the posts normally link to unhelpful and confusing tag pages. I inevitably forget that they do this and I inevitably click off to one of those pages when I’m looking for the source of the story.
To be fair, Gizmodo does this too.
Spalpeen :: More on The Guardian’s linking practices | 28-Mar-09 at 10:10 am | Permalink
[...] other month I wrote a post about The Guardian’s poor linking practices. I’ve since heard that this issue has been raised internally at some level, but haven’t [...]
Spalpeen :: Guardian.co.uk’s poor linking practices continue, Guardian video fixed (a bit) | 23-Jul-09 at 12:54 pm | Permalink
[...] The Guardian’s poor linking practices (which I’ve blogged about previously) continue to cripple the http://www.guardian.co.uk’s usefulness. At time of writing, the story [...]