I’m at an Annenberg conference on “the hyperlinked society.” Subtitle: “Questioning connections in the digital age.” (Program Panelists No known stream, although apparently it’s being taped. IRC: irc.freenode.net #annenberg. Bloggers include: Jeff Jarvis Ethan Zuckerman Jay Rosen Seth Finkelstein Mary Hodder … this is a rough list. sorry if I missed you. It’s early.) [As always, I’m paraphrasing, at best.]

The first panel is led by Jay Rosen. It’s on “mainstream linking.”

Tony Gentile of Healthline talks about his site’s interest in getting people linking to it. Healthline indexes 170,000 sites it considers reliable. In one case, they contractually required a partner to link to them, although it’s usually more mutual. “Pretty much everything is driven off of the links,” including their REST-based API.

Tom Hespos of Underscore Marketing, has an advertising and journalism background. Google was a turning point in the history of hyperlinks, he says. Google gave links intrinsic value [because links boost page rank]. One intended consequence: Link spam. The spamming “is beginning to erode the value” of linking “and we need to do something about it.”

Eric Picard works for the advertising side of Microsoft. His group tries to understand “the economic model of hyperlinking: connecting people to information and to businesses relevant to that information.” E.g., how do you put linked ads into a virtual world that brings value to both the user and the vendor, “or at least doesn’t piss off the user.”

Jay Rosen says that returns to Raymond Williams who says in Culture and Society: There are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses. People are unique, but you can address them as a mass. The Age of Mass Media, says Jay, is about the art and science of seeing people as masses. But today all these ways of seeing people as masses are coming apart. They;’re not as effective. People don’t stand for it any more. So now we have to learn how to see people not as a mass but as a public, a community, knowledge producers. Links connect us horizontally, not just up and down. “All the professions that specialize in seeing people as masses, or as the market, are having to contend with a world where horizontal communication is so much more effective.” Often, if people can meet each other, they don’t need the mass world, says Jay. And, as a blogger, he says, through the “magic of links” he was able to talk about the press without having to go through the filter of the press. “So, for me linking has been powerfully associated with intellectual freedom.”

Q: (Jonathan Kaplan) Comments on the new telecom bill that does not have network neutrality protected?
Tim Hespos: So now we may have another variable about links: How fast it is. That’s a shame.

Tony Gentile: It’s not something people will stand for. We’ll find a way to route around it.
Eric Picard: My personal opinion is that I’d like to see things stay as they are, without tiered access fees.
Jay: I’ve often had the feeling that blogging can’t last because it’s too open and too democratic. A sense of foreboding that they won’t let us keep doing this. It’s too much fun and it’s too free. But I think people won’t stand for it.

Q: (Jeff Jarvis) Google is capturing the wisdom of the crowd. (We do need to figure out how to outsmart the spammers.) Links give power to the people and the collection of links is our collective knowledge.

Q: How does one get links?
Tony: Don’t ask for one. I need to come to know your writing first.

Q: (Me) I asked a rambling question about worrying about commercial interests in getting links, and ego interests in getting links, disrupts the semantics of the web. [Then I was too upset to be able to grasp the answers :( ]
Jay: It has to do with how we see other people, value their time, regard their own freedom. The notion that your time belongs to me because I can trick you into clicking this link…that whole idea that you belong to me because I can stimulate you is the difference between the two types of links.

Q: There’s no nuance to a link. We could put microformats into links.
Tony: Structured blogging or something like it is necessary because right now links don’t imply anything.
Jay: It’d be great to have some sort or urgency, like a triple underscore.

Q: (Consumer Reports) Are you ever approached directly by advertisers? What do they want and what do they give you? Also, it seems like there’s enthusiasm here for exchanging one set of gatekeepers for another.Tony: Advertisers don’t approach us.
Jay: It’s better to be a gatekeeper than to beg a gatekeeper. And the barriers of entry are far lower. [Tags: annenberg hyperlinks hyperlinkedsociety]

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