October 06, 2004

You are on the invidual archive page of Laws of linkage. Click Simon World weblog for the main page.
Laws of linkage

I've been reading the round-up of reaction to the Vice Presidential debate at The Moderate Voice (via Dean) and Allah's, both impressive efforts. Knowing how much work goes into link-fests, it is even more impressive and a great way to quickly summarise the general reaction (which in this case appears to be mixed) to the debate. But it has lead me to formalise something I've been thinking about for a while, which I now dub the Law of Linkage:

The value of any one link in a post is inversely proportional to the total number of links in that post.
For example, if there is only one link in a post, then that link is extremely likely to be followed by interested readers. If there are 10 posts, the chances of jumping to the links are significantly decreased, because if you start following the links you're going to lose the gist of the original post. I admit that on occasion you can find yourself jumping from link to link in random fashion, but usually you're at a particular site because you want to read that site, not others. Obviously if the link is a key part of that post (e.g. an entry reaction to a post at another blog) the chance is that link will be followed; but again the chances are that will be the only link in the post.

When it comes to link-fests there's a second law as well:

The likelihood of any one link being clicked in a post decreases with each additional link that precedes it.
In other words you may even follow the first few links in such a post, but you're not going to be spend hours following them all. In that case the ones at the start are far more likely to be followed than those below (with the possible exception of links at the very end of a post).

These are issues I've been conscious of in constructing the regular Asia by Blog series. It comes down to weighing up being comprehensive to being practical. Going forward I am going to restrict the number of links in each edition in order to make each link more "valuable", albeit not at the expense of providing appropriate coverage. Thoughts welcomed.

posted by Simon on 10.06.04 at 04:32 PM in the Blogging category.




Trackbacks:

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blog.mu.nu/cgi/trackback.cgi/48775


Send a manual trackback ping to this post.


Comments:

Your law of linkage is a rework of Masnick's law of communication wnich was first published in 1973. That law states that a listerner's understanding is inversely proportional to the number of words used. Now this is the general law derived after much experimentation. If I remember the original research it was thought that it varied as the square root of the number of words used but many case studies later it was realised that this was too conservative. An 87% correlation to the direct inverse was found for educated humans.

posted by: da on 10.07.04 at 09:11 AM [permalink]




Post a Comment:

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember your info?










Disclaimer