My technical meanderings and other nonsense. Published since 2002. No, really. I'm *that* internet-old. I remember the days of Indirect link sharing: Link to the source, not someone else’s interpretation of the source.
I’m becoming quite tired of being linked to someone else’s opinion of the source, rather than the source itself.
An example is a recent post on Daring Fireball, which is titled, Jackass of the Week: NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker.
Upon clicking through the link for this post, I am taken not to the source article (which is what I want to see), but rather, another person’s opinion of the same topic. Contained within this second article, I am lucky to find the link to the real source.
However, Daring Fireball did point this out to avoid misleading readers:
NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker claims Apple destroyed the music business in terms of pricing. As John Paczkowski points out, the going rate for digital downloads pre-iTunes was zero. …
Clearly we see the link is to another person’s opinion, rather than the source itself.
On Digg
This is a good reason why I never felt too attached to Digg. It’s that complete disconnection from the source content that slows me down. I don’t need to see Digg users’ opinion of the content, I just want to see the content!
Many folks on Twitter will share a link, but instead of supplying the source URL, they supply Digg’s reference to the source URL. It’s that extra step that wastes a lot of my time.
Multiply the amount of content that I read on weekly basis – if I had the “Digg middle man” in between each link, it would severely cripple my productivity. Following trails of links to the source is not how I like to spend my time.
Matt, good points.
But of course in the blogosphere, the Opinion frequently is the Content.
In some cases, rightly so, but more often than not, folks just add a couple lines of pointlessness to surround a link back to the actual article (or to another opinion). Digg is bad in this respect, as you point out – people starting one-off blogs (AdSense-supported) just to break a news story and profit from the traffic the site sends. It’s one thing to provide interesting commentary on the news, and another thing entirely to just post it for the “me too” value.
One thing I try to do on my blog is link both to commentary I find interesting and relevant as well as the original (as far as I can tell) source of the information. This way there’s a choice, and I feel like context and commentary are often valuable, but the facts are just as important, if not more so. Do you feel like reading snarky commentary or do you feel like just getting the facts? Work or Play? Ultimately, it comes down to things like audience and intent.