News organisations are developing increasingly sophisticated websites: many of them display Web 2.0 features such as tags, feeds and numerous buttons to share articles at social networks. Sometimes though, they just forget the basics.
For instance, I’m interested to learn that the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park is now on live webcam. But – where’s the link to the webcam?
I think the answer is here, but that came from Google, not Reuters. There are lessons here for anyone providing information via the Web. It works because we link to each other.
What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate 
and that’s why PageRank ended up being the engine that makes today’s world go round :).
You may have picked up on my inspiration for this post; Cyberinfrastructure for Knowledge Sharing by John Wilbanks from Science Commons, which discusses why links = pageranks.
See, it was a science post after all ;)
The lack of linking in online articles from the traditional news orgs has always bugged me too. I’ve never been sure why they neglect to link to sites they write about … is it because they want users to stay on their site and not follow off-site links ? Or is it pure lazyness, where links just are not added to an article originally written for dead tree publication ? (long web links in print can look ugly, even if they are useful)
I understand in some cases the big media outlets actively avoid linking sites owned by their competitors .. ie MySpace (and sometimes try to avoid even naming them to make Googling hard) … but Yellowstone doesn’t seem to fall into that category.