Outbound Links - An Endangered Species?

Is it true that people no longer link to blog posts that they quote from?

Problogger seems to think so, and writes about it in an excellent article I think that every blogger should read Outbound Links - An Endangered Species? [And Why I Still Link Up]:

Linking to your sources makes your content more useful to your readers.

Good content is useful content. I’m constantly talking about how to build a successful blog you need to be producing something that is useful in some way to those reading it. By linking to the page where you take a quote or idea you’re providing your readers with the opportunity to read more on the topic or see the quote in it’s original context.

Your reader may or may not click the link - but it does give them the opportunity to explore further or learn more.

I know that as a blog reader when I’m reading a quote that I find particularly interesting that I want to learn more about who said it. If there’s no easy way to do this I think have to go to the effort of researching myself. I actually find this annoying and it creates the impression to me that the author of the content is too lazy or stingy to go to the effort themselves.

Things I read on other blogs quite often spark off my own thoughts on a topic, and so usually I like to quote a key paragraph or two, as I've done here.

Why should we do this?

Apart from the reasons suggested by Problogger, I can add a few more.

1. That is what blogging is basically all about. a blog is a web-log, a log of web sites you have visited and want to remember, so if you don't add links, you are failing in the most fundamental purpose of a blog.
2. They are also links to sites you want to share with others. Yes, I know sites like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon do that too, but blogging gives you more scope to add your personal comments.
3. I'm still sufficiently involved in the academic world to try to take the advice I'm always giving to students: Cite your sources!

And when people quote something from my blog or web sites and don't link, I get pretty annoyed.

I've written articles on various topics, some in blogs and some on ordinary web pages. One of the main reasons I put them on the web is that I'm hoping that other people who are interested in the topic will read them and respond, and give me some ideas. So if someone copies them to their site, with no link or acknowledgment, then if people read them there and respond to them, I won't know, so I regard that is theft. The person who puts that stuff there without a link is stealing the responses that I should have been able to read, and posting it without citing sources is plagiarism.

So I think Problogger's post is very important for all bloggers and webmasters to read, and a hat-tip to TallSkinnyKiwi for pointing me to it. It's a very important part of netiquette.

What do you think?

MS Outlook and YahooGroups

Yesterday I got a message in a YahooGroups mailing list from a friend -- let's call him Pete.

Pete's message began

ON BEHALF OF DAVE

I immediately wondered why Pete was writing on behalf of Dave.

Had Dave's computer crashed?

Or, worse, had he been taken ill, had an accident, been kidnapped or arrested?

So I asked Pete why he was writing on Dave's behalf, and was Dave OK, and he said he wasn't writing on Dave's behalf at all -- the computer had put that phrase in automatically. He assumed that it was something done by YahooGroups.

I'm a member of several YahooGroups mailing lists, and I've belonged to some for years, and I've never seen it put in anything that before.

I asked Pete what mail reader he was using, and he said he was using MS Outlook.

I was aware that many Outlook users have problems in participating in mailing lists because of Outlooks deficient quoting system. I know that many of them have solved these problems by using Quotefix

http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/

and I recommended Quotefix to Pete.

But none of those who have had quoting problems with Outlook have mentioned this particular problem -- of some software, somewhere along the line, inserting text to the effect that the poster of a message was writing on behalf of someone else.

Perhaps some prankster has hacked the YahooGroups list server,

But whatever the cause may be, has anyone else had similar problems when using Outlook as a mailing list reader, whether with the YahooGroups or any other listserv?

Is it a problem with Outlook, or with the server, or with both?

And if you have found a solution, please let me know, so I can tell Pete.

Running out of bandwidth

For the last couple of days we have had no internet access, because we have used up our 2 Gig limit.

This means that we cannot use e-mail or any other services for one week out of four, and so if anyone wonders why we haven't responded to e-mails etc, that is why.

There seems to be an idea the "broadband" means unlimited access, and so people scoff at complaints about sending e-mails with HTML codes that take up ten times the space of the message text, and things like that. I've never looked at YouTube videos that people put in ther blogs, or refer to in e-mails, and newsgroup postings, and we still run out of bandwidth.

Of course part of it is spam, but the fact is that bandwidth is not unlimited, even in these days of high-speed connections.