Just Be And You Are

The hyperlink is amazing. It's pay-it-forward in action. It reduces the six degrees of separation. It connects us to people and ideas we may never have heard of simply because we stumbled upon a site. It also contributes to trends and groupthink. Hyperlinks sometimes remind me of the buzz and gossip of the overvalued blue chips that ultimately bubbled out at the start of the century. The value of what you're being linked is your own judgment call, but so often we empower the person that's linking us with that judgment. Take it to the extreme. If Al Gore - as opposed to Joe Schmo - recommended a green company, you'd check it out. Al Gore certainly has the credentials, but is he becoming outdated? Maybe his personal branding campaign has started outweighing his community service message? Your call. Too often we allow others to make judgment calls for us. The blogosphere is ruled by professional marketers and those that already have celebrity value (think Ashton Kutcher vying for 1,000,000 followers on twitter). It's not a collusive atmosphere, but there's a "club" mentality emerging with friends linking to friends. I still click on hyperlinks, but just like I look for conflicts of interest and financial disclosures when reading scholarly articles, I evaluate the information trail of the link itself. It's really easy to do with any generic rss aggregator (i.e. google reader). Why bother? Because when you open your mouth to talk about the cool thing you read or saw on the net, you're voicing your support of it. You become a representative. Your word-of-mouth sponsorship is as much a hyperlink as the digital url hiding behind the attractive text. The value of the link is up to you.