Thursday, December 11, 2008

Day 28 of 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger

Teach42 challenges us to think about hyperlinking.
“If you think of blogging as a conversation, it is hyperlinks that allow us to connect the voices together. It is a means for citing information, recognizing original ideas, and giving credit where it’s due. It also allows us to make subtle recommendations for further reading and directs traffic between like minded individuals. Additionally, it provides a reference for the people being linked to, in order to see who has taken their material and spun off of it. There are thousands of plugins, widgets, and snippets of code that are designed to take embedded hyperlinks and add functionality. Some provide previews of the page being linked to, others recognize if it’s media and provide a means for consuming it, while others simple tally the links and aggregate them together.”

I realized how important this was when I started to read other people’s blogs. Usually people refer to an article that they had read and refer to it in their post. A lot of times, I want to look at the original article that they are commenting about but if there isn’t a hyperlink, I can’t find the article and I find it somewhat frustrating. I also want people to think some of the ideas are my own because then it would be like stealing. I try to be very conscientious about putting quotation marks around the words that I copy and use in my post. Many times I see this in other blogs but I want to know more than just the quote. I might want to know the background or the context in which they are using this so I need to see the original post. I also don’t want to copy the whole original article in my own post so by hyperlinking to the article, it helps readers decide what they want to see.

photo credit: Original image: 'Rosie the Blogger' http://www.flickr.com/photos/9106303@N05/2493066577by: Mike Licht

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