The New York Times behaves in the same way. Here's a recent story about the US Congress using Twitter: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/washington/13cong.html
The words YouTube and Facebook link to NY Times topic pages about those terms. An exception to this policy seems to be URLs mentioned as URLs. House.gov for instance links to just that. Here's my hypothesis for this behavior. News articles are written for print and paper newspapers don't have hyperlinks. Articles are later translated for the web, so if you see a link in an article you can assume that it's been added after the fact. But adding a link isn't a benign act. It's entirely possible to editorialize, as we've seen in the past with Googlebombing. So how can an editor add some context to the article without slanting it in ways the author didn't intend? The Post's and the Times' solution does just that. Otherwise, who's the gatekeeper for what qualifies as the "One True Link" for a topic? The NYTimes article I linked mentions Nancy Pelosi. There are several reasonable external links for that proper noun. You could link to the official site for the Speaker of the House. You could link to Ms. Pelosi's personal page on her house.gov site, or directly to her biography. You could link to her Gavel weblog. Depending on the venue you could even link to her Wikipedia article, or her Myspace page. The Times' solution is actually pretty nice; they link to everything and they're better able to manage linkrot. Their topic pages appear to be curated and are quite a bit more comprehensive than the Washington Post's automated approach. But they're both essentially collections of internal and external context. As long as the Post and the Times aren't maliciously subverting their readers' trust by linking them to shock sites like Goatse, I have no problem with how their hyperlinks behave. // jeff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=31271 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
