November 2002

The Web's Missing Links

Continued from page 1

By David F. Gallagher

Wenham wrote a program that puts backlinks at the end of each article, with the most-used links listed first. Occasionally, Wenham adds his own comments or excerpts from the linking pages. "Bloggers want to be part of a community," and such backlinks give them an easy way to gather and share feedback about their ideas, Wenham says.  Ben and Mena Trott, a husband-and-wife team behind Movable Type, a popular weblog-publishing system, have enhanced their software with a more sophisticated backlinking feature. When a weblogger publishes an item that makes reference to an entry on another site, their TrackBack feature sends an announcement, or "ping," to that site. If the target site is also using the software, it will automatically add a link and an excerpt from the new commentary to the bottom of the relevant entry. The feature is intended to establish "a connection between authors" that is stronger than anything conventional referral tracking can provide, says Mena Trott.

Webloggers say academic and news sites could benefit from backlinking. "It would be nifty if the newspapers did this, so people could get a sense of the discussion going on around certain topics," says Peter Merholz, a consultant with Adaptive Path, a San Francisco interactive-design firm. An online retailer might also use the technology to offer access to consumers' reviews of its wares, suggests Wenham. But the retailer would have to be comfortable with linking to negative reviews. "You can bet that a lot of the backlinks will go to pages that have gripes," Wenham notes.

Mena Trott expects that more complex uses for backlinking features will emerge over time. "There's a lot you can do with it that we haven't figured out yet," she says.