Fear of links

While professional journalists turn up their noses, weblog pioneers invent a new, personal way to organize the Web's chaos.

By Scott Rosenberg

May 28, 1999 | From the day in 1994 that I first fooled around with the Mosaic browser, I thought it was obvious that, on the Web, links are good. They're a service, a boon, a new kind of communication that distinguishes this strange new medium from its antecedents. I'd always assumed that, as journalists moved onto the Web, they'd welcome their new ability to use links -- to document their sources, explain obscure facts and terms, point people to deeper reading on a subject or just offer wittily ironic asides.

So I was taken aback recently to hear a Wall Street Journal reporter, one who covers the Internet industry, refer to a new breed of Web journalists as "linkalists." It was not a compliment.

The occasion was a panel discussion at a new media conference at the UC-Berkeley Journalism School earlier this year, and the message was clear: People who provide links to other people are performing a low, menial task that any boob can handle, and that doesn't deserve comparison to the hallowed labors that constitute the august tradition of "journalism."

Well, I beg to differ. And, more importantly, the behavior of millions of Web users suggests that they place an extremely high value on the reliable, timely provision of useful -- or quirky, or overlooked -- links. A journalist who today disdains the very notion of providing links to readers may tomorrow find himself without a job.

On the Web, with its unspannable abundance of chaotic and ill-organized information, pointing people to good links is a fundamental service -- a combination of giving directions to strangers and sharing one's discoveries with friends. All of which explains why a phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today.

Weblogs, typically, are personal Web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and personal asides. A good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real-time improvisation, with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff sinks to the bottom. (At Salon, we've been using the "log" label a little differently, to denote short, newsy items that are posted frequently on our sites.)

Since weblogs are usually one-person operations with no editorial hierarchy or institution to say "no" or impose a house style, they tend to embody the strengths and weaknesses of any labor-of-love operation: They're often impassioned and sometimes sloppy; they frequently surprise and just as frequently lose focus.

More fleshed out than a simple link list but less introspective than an online diary, a good weblog is also a window onto the mind and daily life of its creator. By providing an up-to-the-minute and also fully archived record of what they've found in their browsing and what they think about it, weblog creators provide their readers with evolving snapshots of the Web, refracted through a single editorial mind.

Next Page: Where are the weblogs -- and why do journalists sniff at them?

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