Quezi

Link Love (photo by oskay - CC-BY)

Those who take blogging seriously have developed or adopted a formal or informal “code of ethics”, based on a desire to uphold what they believe to be important for the credibility, vibrancy and sustainability of serious blogging. Just about every blogger’s code of ethics covers the use of links.

Blogger Rebecca Blood doesn’t aspire to have bloggers treated as journalists, and builds her code of weblog ethics around transparency. About links, she says:

If material exists online, link to it when you reference it … Online readers deserve, as much as possible, access to all of the facts — the Web, used this way, empowers readers to become active, not passive, consumers of information. Further, linking to source material is the very means by which we are creating a vast, new, collective network of information and knowledge.

One of the blogs operated by blogger “Martin” is “Blogging Ethics”. The latest revision of his Code of Blogging Ethics says this about links:

Be as transparent as possible … cite and link to all sources referenced in each post.

On the same blog, the indefatigable Jessamyn West writes:

I am not particularly sold on the idea of blog ethics. Some might say it’s because I don’t have any. I might say it’s because bloggers just use ethics codes to beat people over the head … Cite and link to all sources referenced in each post: Eh, I don’t see this as particularly necessary. giving a “via” link is seen as good etiquette but a lot of times a post I have is made up of a combination of reading many sources and my own analysis…

Jay Rosen writes that “If bloggers had no ethics, blogging would have failed, but it didn’t. So let’s get a clue” then goes on to describe the link as being the very ethic of the web. See Jay’s video “Jay Rosen of NYU on the Ethic of the Link”. Good bloggers, he says, observe the ethic of the link.

Rafe Colburn takes a similar position, describing links as the “currency of the web“, then struggles with issues such as how to link to a website that one disagrees with (for example, if the target page espouses bigotry). Her commenters aren’t so troubled, with the consensus being “just nofollow the link”.

Dave Winer wrote back in 2002 of his use of “Integrity” as the main criterion for blogroll links (the list of links in the sidebar of many blogs), but admitted that he might also include a website in his blogroll if the site had given him some good links, or simply because he thought it would be useful to his readers.

The whole idea of links as currency has been somewhat skewed by the movement (encouraged by search engines) towards “nofollowing” links from commenters, including by giants such as Wikipedia who count all of their contributors as commenters. Alarmed by this concentration of link love towards the larger sites, many bloggers have embraced the idea of overriding their blogging software so that their links “do follow“. However, the default installation of most blogging software is set to nofollow, so the “do follows” are likely to remain a vocal minority.