Does anyone know of a good tutorial on how to create hyperlinks?
If so, please send it along to Paul Thurrott. He obviously hasn’t mastered that skill yet.
In this week’s blog post, Paul picks up a story from Neowin about the delay of SP3 but doesn’t link to the original Neowin report. (I did.) He quotes dueling statements from McAfee and Microsoft on their escalating brouhaha but doesn’t link to either one. He quotes the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog on their response to a reported bug in IE7 but doesn’t link to it. (I did.) Same with stories about Sony and HP and Apple and Google. See a pattern here? It’s like he’s saying, “Want more details? Google it, buddy! I’m too busy to make those links!”
Oh yeah, and he mentions me, too, by name. I’m really not interested in getting into a food fight with Mr. T, but this really is an important thing. Why does a responsible journalist provide links to articles he writes about? And why should that be one of the criteria you use when evaluating who you get information from? Because that’s the only way you can go check the source for yourself and learn more. (Here’s an example of why it matters.) That’s also the only way you can verify that the person writing the story is not making stuff up. But Paul doesn’t do that. And in the story where he calls me out by name, he just plain gets the facts wrong:
There was a lot of silliness online about Windows Vista licensing this past week, with one of my more vitriolic colleagues, Ed Bott, taking me to task for publishing an article that relayed Microsoft’s official position on the Vista EULA (End User License Agreement). After explaining that this was the wrong thing to do, and claiming he had all the facts, Bott then later published an email Q & A he had with Microsoft himself a few days later, because he was “still trying to understand the confusing new licensing terms.”
But, oops! No links! So Paul’s many fans will just have to shake their heads and tsk-tsk about this Bott guy without ever reading what I wrote. Ironically, in the article that sent Paul around the bend, I wrote:
I’ve dug deeply into this issue and I’m convinced that he’s being spun by his sources at Microsoft. Unlike Paul, I’ll give you links to all the facts, so you can read the supporting documents and decide for yourself.
Go ahead, follow the links to Paul’s post and mine and see for yourself if you can find the part where I claimed to have all the facts. I did have about a dozen more facts than Paul, all of which contradicted his sloppy research, which consisted of phoning a Microsoft product manager and printing a quote. That’s not journalism, that’s stenography.
I don’t bother subscribing to Paul’s 436 weekly articles (I may have missed a few – the man is definitely a faster typist than me) precisely because he often gets stuff wrong and he never cites his sources. So even if I find something interesting, Paul’s articles don’t do anything to help me learn more about it. But his name pops up in Technorati and he gets linked to by other people occasionally, so I see stuff like this.
It’s a great way to run your own personal echo chamber, I suppose, but it’s not journalism. And Paul? You’ll be pleased to know I didn’t use a single expletive.
Over to you, Paul. And I’ll get you that tutorial on hyperlinking as soon as I can dig it up.
Ed Bott 
OMG–I just had a flashback to freshman English (high school, not college) class! The teacher was foaming at the mouth about footnotes in research papers, which I suppose are the ancestors of hyperlinks.
Anyway, no one reading Ed’s emissions or Paul’s pontifications would mistake them for serious journalism. Entertaining, provocative, informational? Yup. Journalism? Nah, waaay too much writer opinion intertwined into the stories.
Journalism and opinion are mutually exclusive? Hoo boy, there’s a can of worms.
So if I run a Magic Marker through the opinionated parts but don’t change any of the research or factual statements, then it’s journalism? Think about it.
To me, being a responsible journalist means being fair, getting your facts right, promptly correcting errors, and sticking with a story.
And linking to source material isn’t just footnoting. In the 21st Century, it’s the only way to allow real-time fact-checking.
It’s all to do with ad revenue and the reader’s eyes on the article in question. Thurrott wants to keep readers reading until the end and doesn’t want to send them off to other sites in the meantime. I guess his readers just trust him blindly and don’t require proof. That must be nice!
Adrian, that might have been true in 1997. It certainly isn’t true today. Even the stodgiest old-line media properties now provide hyperlinks to stuff they’re writing about. That’s what makes this stuff so odd. It’s not like the rest of the web. It’s almost like he doesn’t want to be associated with us common folk.
Mr. T is still stuck in the Not Invented Here newspaper syndrome.
Yep he is a stenographer.
I’m thinking a geek boxing match is in order here. We can get Dvorak to referee and Leo Laporte to call the fight. We can even record the whole thing on video. Loser has to use Windows ME as a workstation for three months. What say you, sir?
Windows Me for three months? Cruel and unusual punishment!
It’s very common … just a quick look at the “old media” that’s on the web, and I’m seeing very few links. Here in the UK sites like the BBC, Times, etc are very stingy with links and most will only add them as an aside and rarely put them in the body of the text. I see the same thing going on with US media. This is because they aren’t used to the “new way” of doing business.
You and I link because it’s in out nature to do so and we want to give a broad, fair picture of things, but I know of a lot of website and blog networks that do very little in the way of linking to other sites … and the reason there is almost exclusively an ad revenue issue (they want the visitors to click on an ad, not a link to another site). I know that a couple of the big blog networks have a limits on the number of links that are allowed.
In this case, I think that the reason is that Thurrott doesn’t link to you (or anyone else) is that his audience doesn’t demand it. If you have the following, you can do what you want.
Or maybe he knows how the ZDNet business model works and doesn’t want to send visitors your way…
Just had a quick look at my PC Doc stats for the last week … about 80% of visitors leave the site via a link to another site. Imagine if they all left the site via a Google ad 🙂
Maybe when I’m as big as Thurrott I can do away with links in posts 😉
Windows Me for three months? The loser would get nothing done for 3 months!
Maybe Paul had been reading Steve Gillmor for too long? Steve thinks links are dead. Or course, he says that about Office and Notes too.
Don’t forget that almost all of his writings come in the form of text-based email newsletters, where linking isn’t exactly wieldy.
His only true blog is his Internet Nexus, where appropriate to the format he links liberally.
Rick,
I said I wasn’t going to use any expletives, so I won’t. But the claim that text-based newsletters are incompatible with links is … bogus.
Somehow Brian Livingston and Fred Langa and Scot Finnie and other professionals who do their work primarily through newsletters manage to deliver text-based versions that include links. If one wants to be credible, there’s a way. If one wants to live and work in a personal echo chamber, there’s a different way.
Well, almost every big media company links to their sources. C|Net sure doesn’t. http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/robert/archive/2006/10/18/News.com-Needs-To-Start-Citing-Sources.aspx
So you touch on a more interesting point here- about his general style of writing – or rather, where he gets the info on what he writes. It’s always amazing how he just ‘happens’ to have the latest tid-bits on Vista, other products, etc. It’s often funny that his ‘reviews’ manage to bounce out at key dates. It’s strange how whenever Microsoft want to get a point across, you can rest assured that Mr T will have the story. It’s weird how he can sleep easy at night when it’s clear that his employer, Penton (who publish Win IT Pro) have such amazingly tight links to Microsoft that any suggestions of serious impartiality are questionable.
Mr T has had his day. The deferential treatment he once received from the ‘community’ has long since expired. Bloggers don’t buy the Microsoft PR line quite as easily as he writes about it. You’re right about one thing – he calls up Microsoft Managers / Wagner PR – and the story is as good as written.
I’m trying to think if posts like this are why I hate blogs or why I love them. All the internal candor that you can’t normally find at superficial corporate environments, and yet, sadly, all the internal candor that you can’t normally find at superficial corporate environments.
A little civility, guys? I guess you learned him, Ed, by not linking to his site. I don’t know who either of you are kidding here. You both have ad-supported sites that benefit, under the Google oligarchy, with additional inbound links. I typed in Paul Thurrott in Google (without quotes) and he came up as the first link. I hardly think, that if I was so inclined to idle away three hours of my life to read all this childish bickering, that I’d be miffed about having to Google someone for about 11 seconds – especially when I can do it right within my Firefox browser.
So, maybe you guys could kiss and makeup and the world of pro commentators (or as you call them – journalists) could carry on the burden of reporting on Windows. With an army of Mac and Linux fiends hot on your trail, it hardly seems you have the luxury of fireside bickering. Just my two cents worth on the overall value us faithful readers glean from stuff like this. And I’ll make the disclaimer here that I’m no puppet of Thurrott’s, and even link to you, Ed, on my blog, not Thurrott. But mostly because I just love the font you use on this site. I still can’t wrap my head around it. It’s beautiful. It truly is. I may just copy you one day soon.
Lawrence:
Um, I did link to his site. It’s the very first link in this column. And I did the same in the column I wrote at ZDNet.
If you’re going to pick at me, at least pick at me for something I actually did.
Oops! My bad. Sorry, Ed. I didn’t see that. Now I’ve been dragged into the cat fight. Thanks for catching my error.