One of the most useful aspects of Twitter for me is following the links people post to their blogs and things they've been reading/watching. There's always good stuff in there.

But Twitter's like a 24-hour water cooler - people drift in for a while then move on and you never know who's going to be there when you show up nor what you've missed in the meantime.

You can look at someone's Twitter timeline and see everything they've been doing in the past few hours or days, but that can take a while.

Enter Twitturly, which lets you see what people have been linking to. It searches a Twitter user's timeline and pulls out posts containing links, filtering out the rest.

Go to http://twitturly.com and type in someone's Twitter username or type http://twitturly.com/user/username into your browser address bar.

Say you want to see what New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson's been linking to. Go to http://twitturly.com/user/fredwilson and you'll see a page like this:
















Type in http://twitturly.com/user/starrjulie and you'll see what I've been linking to.
















Nice.

As a user, I love websites that point me helpfully in the direction of more information on the topic I'm reading about - maps, documents, background articles, related blog posts/news stories, definitions, how-tos, Wikipedia articles on economic theories etc.

News sites are often reluctant, however, to point people away from their websites, preferring to link to previous stories on their own site or, at a pinch, an external government document.

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has been having a blitz on the value he sees for news organisations in linking out. He's published a string of posts on the subject recently and is also tied up with Publish2.0, a tool for link journalism which lets you save links (related to your round, say), and share and publish those links. It looks interesting.




















In the spirit of link journalism, then, here are a bunch from my recent reading...

The first of Scott's recent posts to catch my eye was this one:

There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’t serve advertisers well. But if you actually look at the data, both of these assumptions are completely wrong.

How Newspapers Abdicated the Front Page's Influence and How They Can Get it Back by Linking

The front page of the newspaper used to set the news agenda. Extra, Extra, read all about it! But that influence has steadily waned through the TV and Cable News era, and the web now threatens to obliterate it entirely. So who sets the news agenda now?

Link Journalism in Action: Vols Game Coverage Roundup Most Viewed and Commented on GoVolsXtra.com

Yeah, fine, so Drudge gets lots of traffic for links, but we’re not Drudge, so it won’t work for our news site, right? Wrong. Here’s a case example from Knoxnews.com’s sports site GoVolsXtra.com.This roundup of links to coverage and commentary on the Vols’ loss to Florida was the MOST VIEWED article today on GoVolsXtra.com.

Why Every News Site Should Put a Continuously Updated News Aggregation on the Homepage

My post on Drudge beating all other news sites on engagement was an aha for many, which is interesting because the lesson of Drudge has been around for a decade. But the lessons of web publishing are all so utterly counterintuitive that I suppose they take a while to sink in.

Mainstream News Organizations Entering the Web's Link Economy Will Shift the Balance of Power and Wealth

The New York Times published an article this week about mainstream news organizations embracing link journalism and news aggregation. Gawker and others scoffed that they are late to the game, which they are, but that misses (predictably) the BIG story.

Guardian Launches Full RSS Feeds, First Media Company Not To Suppress RSS Adoption

And you can't go pass Jeff Jarvis for more insight into the link economy.

The link economy v. the content economy

Links can be exploited and monetized; get links and you can grab audience and show ads and make money. Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links.

The imperative of the link economy

1. All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.

2. The recipient of links is the party responsible for monetizing the audience they bring. In the old content-economy model of syndication, the creator sells content to another and the one who syndicates has to come up with the ad or circulation revenue sufficient to pay for it. Now in the link economy, it’s reversed: When you get traffic, you need to figure out how to benefit from it. As Doc Searls said at the event: this is a shift from “making money with” to “making money because.”

3. Links are a key to efficiency. In other words: Do what you do best and link to the rest.

It's a link economy, stupid

In part two of his seminar to the Guardian, as part of the Future of Journalism series, Jeff Jarvis argues that links are worth more than content. (Guardian video)

Speaking of links, this is a nice little piece from a guy called David Eaves who has an SEO company in the UK.

I won't pretend to be able to recreate the maths, but in essence he collected a few vital statistics for large mainstream websites - including incoming and outgoing links - threw them into an Excel spreadsheet and came up with a chart...


... and this:

"The resulting figure of 0.842733801 shows that in general there is a strong relationship between news websites linking out and getting links in return."

I like the way he notes in his post that it's not fair to lump all mainstream news sites in together, and that:

"As a blogger it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the fact that mainstream media websites are, with the exception of the BBC, business entities with shareholders and an obligation to maximise profits. It’s understandable that they are reluctant to send valuable page views elsewhere."

Quite.

He also sought comment from the websites he looked at and the two quoted are worth a read. This is part of what FT.com's editor James Montgomery had to say:

"One needs a clear distinction between “attribution” and “sourcing”, journalistically speaking. Citing a non-FT source would not, generally speaking, meet the FT’s required standards of verification. (Just because something is reported by the New York Times, say, doesn’t make it true, however much we implicitly believe what we read in that newspaper - we have to check for ourselves.)

"Obviously, we are more inclined to believe some sources (Reuters) than others (chat rooms). Many blogs might be regarded as inherently unreliable because they don’t reveal their sources or uphold traditional journalistic/MSM standards of reporting (eg, double sourcing, on the record or whatever). But there is nothing intrinsically untrustworthy about blogs as a genre.

"So when it comes to linking out on FT.com, a link does not constitute sourcing for us. But as a general rule, if we do acknowledge some third party content, then best practice would be to carry a link to it.

"For example, if we write: “Yesterday’s statement by the prime minister appeared to represent a climbdown from an interview to the BBC last week in which he pledged….”, then we would link “interview” to the BBC article. That’s a service to the reader, who may want to follow the link to learn more; and a confirmation that we have accurately reported the earlier quote.

"Do we also live up to this best practice? No, because of some technology issues to do with persistent hyperlinks in text in our CMS, and newsroom training. But we are improving."

For those keeping an eye on the success or otherwise of hyperlocal websites, this is worth a read. It's a Wall Street Journal piece about the less-than-stellar debut of a Washington Post hyperlocal site called LoudounExtra.com.


By way of background:

"Like hundreds of other hyperlocal sites launched in the past few years, LoudounExtra.com reflects a basic premise: Metro newspapers probably can't compete with the Internet or cable TV in covering breaking national and international news, but they can dominate what happens in their backyards.

"LoudounExtra.com offers detailed databases including every church, restaurant and school in Loudoun County, about 25 miles west of Washington, D.C. It embraces the idea that a high-school prom is as newsworthy as a debate over where to build a hospital, and that Little League deserves major-league attention. And it promises to let visitors to the site shape the news through blogs and photo and video submissions."

The WSJ notes that despite those intentions, "LoudounExtra.com remains little more than a skeleton of the site its architects pledged to build. One reason: the team of outsiders [brought in to build the site] didn't do enough to familiarise itself with Loudoun County or engage its 270,000 residents."

What leapt out at me was that the Post wasn't linking to LoudounExtra:

"Mr. Curley [the site's developer] says whenever a big story breaks involving Loudoun County, the Post typically publishes it on Washingtonpost.com without a link to LoudounExtra. That deprives LoudounExtra of potential traffic.

"Nor does the Washingtonpost's own dedicated Loudoun County page send visitors directly to its online sibling."

Huh? Links are oxygen.

"In September, when Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit announced it was moving its headquarters from Dulles, Va., to New York, the Post linked to the story on LoudounExtra.com for a couple hours before moving the story back to its own site. That window of promotion fueled the Loudoun site's best traffic day to date, Mr. Curley says.

"Jim Brady [executive editor of Washingtonpost.com] now says he is considering replacing the current Loudoun County page on Washingtonpost.com with LoudounExtra.com, although he adds he doesn't want LoudounExtra.com or future hyperlocal sites to be too dependent on Washingtonpost.com for traffic."

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand why the smaller site should have to stand on its own, especially not from the get-go. No site develops or thrives without links and all sites benefit from more links.

Wouldn't it make more sense to develop a network of niche sites which complement the main web property, and build a matrix of links between them?

I get the feeling audiences are less and less interested in destination sites and want to stumble across information in the natural course of their day or order what they want and have it delivered. I know I am. If that proves true, well-linked networks would make more sense than a chain of isolated sites.

From Howard Owens comes a useful list of tips for journalists who want to 'own their own names' - ie get yourself, your CV, website and blog established and visible in Google searches:

• Get a Facebook profile going. Use it to link to your site.
• Start a LinkedIn profile (be sure to take advantage of the service that allows you to create a URL containing your name). My LinkedIn profile page does well in Google. Also, link to your site.
• Start a profile page on Wired Journalists. Link to your site. My profile page hits the second page of a Google search for my name.
• My Buzznet site ranks real high for my name in Google, so start posting photos to Buzznet.
• Ditto for Flickr.
• Grab your name, as in “clairstamant,” as a Twitter account. My Twitter account ranks high on Google.
• Start a Digg account. Be a good Digg member and digg worthwhile links, but also when you do a good post, digg your own post. This will help with SEO, too. My Digg account ranks high on Google.
• Start a YouTube account with your real name as your account name. This should rank high, then, in Google searches for your name. Of course, you’ll want to post some videos. I don’t know how other hiring managers would feel, but I’m going to look more at the spirit of the effort than the quality of the content. I’m not expecting your personal creative expressions online to be NBC ready.
• Start a second blog. This is an opportunity to add a little SEO juice to your main, professional domain, and it gives you an outlet for personal expression, while keeping your name.com site for professional purposes.
• Always use your real name online — for EVERYTHING you do. Never leave an anonymous comment. Never use an assumed name. You want people to know you, find you, look for your, know who you are and what you do. Not only is posting anonymously unethical for journalists to do, it robs you of a chance to increase your visibility. Also, cheap and easy anonymity can lure you into a career-ruining mistake. Remember, you can always be found out.

This comes under the category of cool tools:


Type the url of any website into urlmetrix and you get instant numbers on what that site's Google page rank is, how many times it's been bookmarked to Del.icio.us, its Technorati rank, Compete rank, Google and Yahoo backlinks and more.

Great fun punching in sites you know and seeing what comes up.