Linking things

Jan 14, 2011 Alun Digital Academia 1 Comment

Mick Mor­rison has been irked.

I’ve run into a sim­ilar prob­lem with AoB Blog. The way the feeds work, the head­line can point to an external link and not the blog post. So if the post is just “Hey look at this!” I can put the external link into the head­line so that Twit­ter and Face­book feeds point dir­ectly to the linked page. If that’s a story about a sci­ence paper where should I link to?

For AoB Blog I’ve decided that the sci­entific paper is what mat­ters. If the news story links to the paper, I can link to the news story so the finder gets credit and a page view. If they don’t I’ll link to the paper in the head­line and not the news site. They’ll still get a credit but only in the text of the blog post — which people fol­low­ing AnnBot on Twit­ter or Face­book will miss.

What I’m won­der­ing is if I should just make that a gen­eral rule. Some report­ers genu­inely do add some­thing when writ­ing up a story. Many oth­ers reheat high­lights from the press-release. If I can find the ori­ginal papers when think­ing about link­ing to a story then I’m sure I could reheat the abstract and put the dir­ect link into the ori­ginal paper. I would like to give credit to people who point at inter­est­ing things. At the same time how much does it add to link to a news story that adds noth­ing and doesn’t help you find a paper? Is it enough to simply add Heads-up AP with a link to ap.org as a credit?

Do more Research Blog­ging is usu­ally near the top of my to-do list. One of the fea­tures I really like about the Research Blog­ging web­site is the insist­ence on link­ing back to the source paper if you want to be aggreg­ated there. I think the idea of hard and fast rules for blog­ging is a bit silly, but I am think­ing that if the story is about the research and the news site is not adding any­thing then it’s the research that should be the high­lighted link in a blog post.

In related news the redesign of AoB Blog seems to be fin­ished. The thing I like on the front page is the fea­tured items slider that it pulls the first DOI link from a post and makes a Get Art­icle but­ton. Now the AoB redesign is fin­ished I’m in no rush to change this site’s tem­plate, but when I do I might look at whether I can reuse the code for my website.