In Salon.com, Laura Miller joins the growing discussion over where to put the links: The hyperlink war. Excerpt:
Because I cover the antediluvian communication technology known as the book, I rarely get mixed up in the ongoing, pundit-driven conversation about the Nature of the Internet. Actually, "conversation" hardly seems the right word for what's largely a symphony of prognostication, thumb-sucking, posturing and enough grandiose shade-throwing to make the drag-ball competitions of "Paris Is Burning" look as sedate as a council session of the EU.
However, inspired by Nicholas Carr's new book, "The Shallows," and the feedback of Salon readers, I've lately been experimenting with a departure from standard Web practice. I'm refraining from including hyperlinks to relevant sources in the text of my articles and instead collecting them in a paragraph at the end of each piece. Carr's book refers to several studies indicating that people who read texts containing embedded hyperlinks comprehend and remember less of what they read than people reading plain text.
As a front-page story in the New York Times confirmed on Monday, many regular Internet users are complaining of a growing inability to concentrate, and they, too, blame the siren song of technological distraction. If putting links at the end of my articles instead of installing them in the text makes reading a little bit easier or more pleasant for my own readers (and the majority of them say it does), then it seems worth a shot.Read the whole story to find the links, which you can then ignore if you like.
I will sound ungracious, but Ms. Miller's writing style is a worse problem than her links. The sentences and paragraphs are just too long.
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