July 22, 2006
Gratuitous Hypertext—Why Do We Link?
I've always been a little puzzled over the NYT's employment of hypertext links in many of its articles. There's a tendency to link relatively low-level, obvious things, like names of countries or cities that either (a) are so well-known that I'm not sure who would click the link, or (b) have such a tangential relationship to the main story that I'm not sure who would click on the link.
So here's this link, in an otherwise pretty interesting (to me at least) article, "Chasing the Perfect Taco Up the California Coast" by Cindy Price:
The link takes you to this page at the NYT, which apparently indexes every article about Julia Child the NYT ever published. And there are some interesting articles there, but I'm not sure who follows links like that. Similar links earlier in the same taco article go to geographical places (LA and SF, and another link to California in general). Name-dropping and geographical name-checking are common hypertext opportunities at NYT. (And why link to Julia Child but not David Crosby?)
I guess it's not so much that every link in a hypertext has to be something that I'd, personally, want to follow, but there's something gratuitous about them: they're not motivated by any real interest in the main theme of the story, but just in the fact that it was easy information to link to. The NYT does occasionally provide links I think are useful—in the article above, they link to the weblog tacohunt, for example (recursively, tacohunt now sports a digicam shot of the NYT article in question). But in general I skip over the links the NYT offers because I've come to learn that they're not very interesting or useful.
Which has always been one of the problems of hypertext: Once you give someone the freedom to insert a link into their text, every word looks like a potential link. But the trick is in knowing when "potential" equals "useful" or at least "interesting."
Posted by johndanseven at July 22, 2006 11:56 PM