More than 70 people have tweeted the link so far.

That’s fine. Some, most or maybe all of them think it’s worth sharing. No problem there.

But I’ve wondered since last night, when I first saw the link, if people realized what it was: linkbaiting as SEO, with the hopes of increasing traffic to an irrelevant site, boosting its rank in search results for the keywords in its URL.

Of course we all want links to our sites. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the folks who tweet and retweet the link become a party to this practice of gaming the Web and devaluing higher-quality content that generates traffic organically.

Context

I received an email notification that I had a new message sent through my personal blog’s contact form at 12:37 a.m. on Jan. 5, 2010. Here are the details:

NAME

Amber Johnson

E-MAIL

amber.johnson1983@gmail.com

MESSAGE

Hi,
We posted an article, " 10 Iconic Journalists Every JStudent Should Study” (http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2010/01/04/10-iconic-journalists-every-jstudent-should-study/), and I thought that you or your readers might find it appealing.
Wishing you Happy & Prosperous New Year

Amber Johnson

I’ve received a few messages like this in the past and planned to disregard this one too. Judging by the approach and complete lack of personalization (that’s right, don’t even use my name in the note, which is probably submitted by some kind of script), I guessed that other journalism bloggers had received also it.

Sure enough, I saw a few links to it on Twitter within minutes. Did they think it was linkbait?

Here’s how a journalist should verify content before linking to it

1. What is the URL?

The domain is the first possible indicator. For the “10 Iconic Journalists” post, this should set off the first set of warning bells:

onlinecolleges[dot]net/2010/01/04/10-iconic-journalists-every-jstudent-should-study

Come on, it looks fishy from onset. You probably wouldn’t open an email from Online Colleges, nor would you likely click such a textlink ad in your email program, so why would you want be a relay point for that promotion?

2. What’s on the site?

College-related content and search.

3. Does this content on this site seem out of place?

Does a site called OnlineColleges really care what journalism students study? No, they want you to use their service. Look at the other recent blog content. And the email sender was “savvy with their target group — journalists on Twitter — who will tweet and RT the hell out of the link,” as Daniel Petty said in a reply. It’s very smart of them to have authorititave people with strong reputations to generate buzz.

4. Who owns the site?

Whenever this isn’t immediately clear on the about page or in the footer, you should be suspicious. Why don’t they list it?

5. Who owns the URL?

OnlineColleges.net is registered to Stephanie Marchetti of Glen Ellyn, IL. Based on a search of her name and search of her email address, it looks as though she’s registered other similarly named domains, such as graduatedegree[dot]org, mbainfo[dot]com and eduers[dot]com. She owns a total of 51 domains, according to DomainTools.com.

Note: I couldn’t find anything connecting her to the email address that sent the message to my blog.

6. Who has previously linked to the site?

Search link:URL on Google (substitute the address for URL and make sure there’s no space between it and the link: search operator).

7. Who sent the link?

“Amber Johnson”

8. Is it a real person?

The name sounded like a fake when I first saw the message, so I searched Amber Johnson, Amber Johnson + advertising, Amber Johnson + pr, Amber Johnson + Online Colleges, etc, etc. with no luck.

I also searched that name with the registrants name — without success.

9. If it’s not a real person, who is it?

I searched the email address from my contact form and didn’t find anything helpful until I put quotes around it. After the search, sometime during the 1 a.m. hour, I got one result, which included this:

• 59.99.25.117 of INDIA claims to be amber.johnson1983@gmail.com reported for SPAM

The IP address links to a page with more details, which indicates the email bounced off a telecom company server in India. Not very helpful, but an important step in this investigation.

As I did all this, I was chatting with Daniel Bachhuber on IM (Daniel aptly noted that someone might just be using that particular server to send the message; it might not be the actual computer from where it was sent) and posting a few key details to Twitter (read some of the discussion).

I also searched “amber.johnson1983,” which gave me four results last night, including the one from the above search. Two results showed the same message I received and the other showed a similarly spammy request.

What to do

It’s important to always open links before you retweet or share them online. It doesn’t hurt to check the short URL or text of a tweet or DM beforehand if it’s suspect.

It’s also good to read, watch, listen to or in some other way consume the content on that page before you share (I’ll admit that I too could do a better job of fully consuming the content).

You could also follow steps similar what I did with the “10 Iconic Journalists” post.

Take away the source and context and the big question is, “Does this provide value?” Or, “Does this meaninfully add to the conversation?” Regardless of everything else, I knew from seeing the content that I found this post to have no real value. (OK, maybe just a tad in stirring comments of who should be on the list).

Conclusion

Don’t take the linkbait. Whether it’s an unknown site that looks spammy or a big site trying to keep their traffic up throughout the day by posting new content with little value, you don’t want to be known as someone who falls for this and, by making the bait-layer successful, strengthening the practice.

What’s the best etiquette? I think it’s ok to send someone a message such as, “Hey, I thought you’d be interested in this” or “I’d love your thoughts on this” and let the person do what they want. They’ll link it on their own if they like it. I’m more likely to not share a link if you ask just because I don’t want to open the door to more solicitations.

For the newsy crowd, journalists shouldn’t include a source or a source’s information in a story without verifying who they are and what they’re motivation is, so why not do the same on Twitter?

Sure, you don’t have to. But with all the noise and what I’ll call chaff-disguised-as-wheat online, why not — as a journalist — do your due diligence when sharing a link? And, sure, you may say a link or RT is not an endorsement, but it might still be perceived as such.

It’s not simply about denying linkbaiters their pageviews and buzz, it’s about your credibility and reputation as a trusted source of information.

Moreover, verifying information or links you pass along is something everyone, not just journalists should do, no matter the medium. And, if you can’t verify it, provide context. (More good reading on that topic here.)

Link journalism makes context easy in stories online. But the link in itself is not necessarily journalism — it’s what you do to verify its source and accuracy that makes it journalism and, thus, more valuable.

“Because it’s on the Web” is no excuse for not verifying. That just leads to low-quality content, of which there’s plenty online. Instead, you should strive for the best quality because there is so much garbage out there.

Far too often people tweet or retweet something as a knee-jerk reaction, whether they read it or not. It seems that some people have become accustomed to over-sharing links. They might be well intentioned, but I would just like those frequent linkers to think:

• Is this really providing value?
• Is this unique? Specifically, has it been tweeted a million and two times already?

True, we all have different audiences and even having many overlapping followers doesn’t mean you should leave out the others who might not have seen it. We all need to be more discerning about what we share — and we need to know where it comes from.

There’s plenty of linking, but I’d like to see more thinking along with it.

Epilogue

Because we’re talking about links to lists, I’ll also say that all these of specific skills journalists need to have are all well and good, but the fundamentals are more important. Specifically, thinking critically and being skeptical.

Bonus link: Craig Kanalley on how to verify a Tweet.

A version of this post can also be found at The Linchpen.

The Northwest Newsgroup was the first to prove that a large group of reporters, editors, and producers across a wide range of newsrooms — from a variety of media companies — could collaborate to curate regional breaking news. The Northwest Newsgroup became a collaborative newswire for the Web, one based on linking to the original reporting at the source.

This week, during the Copenhagen climate summit, a group of journalists from Mother Jones, The Nation, Grist, The UpTake, TreeHugger, and other news organizations have applied the collaborative newswire model to a major international news story, forming the Copenhagen News Collaborative to curate the best coverage from their own reporters, editors, and analysts covering the event.

Here’s the collaborative newswire published at Mother Jones:

Grist published links from their own an newsgroup alongside the collaborative Copenhagen Newswire (Indy Media @ Copenhagen), which became an integral part of their Copenhagen coverage:

The Copenhagen collaborative newswire appears as part of the new EnviroNation blog at The Nation:

Discover Magazine’s Intersection blog introduced their Copenhagen News Collaborative participation to their readers, pointing out the widget in their sidebar and finishing with this note:

“…there is a lot of Copenhagen news coming, and we stand at a nexus for producing it….”

Updated 12/10/09: The Copenhagen collaborative newswire is now live on TreeHugger’s key page on the climate summit:

Here’s a look at the long list of journalists in the Copenhagen News Collaborative Newsgroup at Publish2:

Collaboration is key: A lone news organization couldn’t provide the range of news and analysis covered by the stories being submitted by these sources.

Think about how you can make this work at a local level. Are you already exchanging links, stories, and photos with other local news organizations? Or are you still trying to cover every angle of every story on your own? What about national and international news? Would you rather publish links chosen by an algorithm trying its best to match a keyword search, or a high quality newswire full of stories hand-picked by journalists who know their beats?

Ready to build your own collaborative newswire?

Choose a topic or region, start a Publish2 Newsgroup, invite your peers and colleagues from other news organizations to join, and use Publish2 widgets and feeds to automatically publish a stream of curated news across platforms, send links to Twitter, and bring your readers the best of the Web, from any source in the world.

Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.

That’s how a quiet revolution began in Washington state Wednesday. Four journalists spontaneously launched one of the first experiments in collaborative (or networked) link journalism to cover a major local story.

But it gets better. Those four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: Some of them have never even met in person.

“The whole thing came together on Twitter yesterday morning,” Elaine Helm, new media editor at the Herald in Everett, said in an email Thursday.

The story was crazy rain in western Washington: evacuations, flooded and closed highways, avalanches, a breached levee, the whole deal. Elaine (@ehelm on Twitter), put a call out for local Twitterers to adopt a common hashtag for flooding coverage. Paul Balcerak (@paulbalcerak), assistant editor of dynamic media for Sound Publishing, suggested #waflood, which they agreed on and posted for their Twitter followers to see.

As Paul described it in an email, Brianne Pruitt (@briannepruitt, Wenatchee World web editor) and Angela Dice (@adice, Kitsap Sun web editor) picked up on the hashtag, “and it snowballed.”

That would have been innovation enough, but Paul went a step further: He saved links to flood coverage through Publish2, tagging each with “waflood,” and posted on Twitter that he was doing so. Soon Elaine, Angela, and Brianne were also adding links to Publish2 with a “waflood” tag.

They then put Publish2 widgets on their news organizations’ sites that displayed the links they were collaboratively gathering, greatly expanding their sites’ coverage of the flooding.

Here’s the Herald’s link roundup (which is also linked on the Herald’s homepage);

Kitsap Sun’s (inset in a story at left, linked on the homepage at right, and on this full page of links);

Wenatchee World’s (see inset box at left);

and the one at Sound Publishing’s pnwlocalnews.com (see “Washington state flooding” at the bottom).

Voila — instant collaborative link newswire!

The collaborative spirit of journalism’s future

This collaboration is remarkable in all kinds of ways.

First, you can tell by the Twitter timestamps how quickly everything came together. Second, with a link newswire fed by multiple news organizations, there’s a danger that everyone might add only their own stories to the mix. But this group added outside sources as well (including the News Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times, Yakima Herald-Republic, the Daily Record, and more). Third, all four independently and instantly “got” what the others were doing, which shows how much the ideas of collaboration and link journalism (and even the term itself) have spread.

Lastly, did I mention the four journalists work for different media companies? The Herald is owned by the Washington Post Co., Kitsap Sun by Scripps, Sound Publishing by Black Press (of Victoria, B.C.), and Wenatchee World is independent/family-owned. Paul hasn’t met Angela or Brianne in person, and has met Elaine briefly once. Yet none of that was an obstacle.

I asked Angela in an email whether she knew the others in non-Twitter life. Here’s her wonderful answer:

I used to work with Elaine at the Sun and talk to her regularly, and she’s one of the reasons I joined Twitter. While I’d never done any project with Brianne before, she had made it a point to visit other papers around the region and introduce herself when she became the Wenatchee World web editor, which is how I started following her on Twitter. I met Seth Long [Sound Publishing's new media director] on Twitter, which is how I met Paul, neither of whom I’ve met in person. They both, however, work with a former co-worker and friend of mine. It’s a small, small online journalism world in Western Washington.

How refreshing is that? Forget walled gardens — this is the spirit of journalism’s future.

In some ways the networked linking process is an extension of how newsrooms collaborate with traditional wire services, but I think the Washington project is more than that. Papers using a traditional wire service aren’t really collaborating. They’re primarily trying to a) extend the reach of their stories, and b) get access to material they can’t afford to produce on their own.

The dynamic on display Wednesday, and the relationships Angela described in the quote above that allowed for this collaboration, seem more organic — a mental leap forward. They even emphasized the collaboration in the widget descriptions: Kitsap Sun’s says “Stories are chosen by news reporters and editors from Washington news organizations,” while the Herald’s says “Below are news stories that journalists around the state have selected to post using a service called Publish2.”

I asked Seth Long (@greenergrad) about a similar project he and Angela had worked on in December to round up links to snowstorm coverage. (For future Wikipedia articles on link journalism: To my knowledge, theirs was the first example of networked link journalism across media companies.)

He noted that “Her newspaper is a direct competitor with a group of our community weeklies.” In the old world, that would have made collaboration a non-starter. But today readers rightly come first. As Seth said, “My perspective is that our job is to serve our communities as best we can.”

Innovation that’s easy, popular, and cheap

The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that).

Seth said the December snowstorm link roundup was on the homepage for three or four days — but it was the site’s most-trafficked story for the entire month. (This tracks with Knoxnews.com’s success with a popular football link roundup.)

Angela described some of the other benefits of collaborative linking:

I think it’s especially useful in situations like these, where events affect a large region. I can also see it being used as a way to track things like state government news, or any broad-reaching issue that your readers will be talking about.

Having a group of people adding the links just makes your job that much easier. As both a reader and a web editor, I can keep updated on what’s happening on a particular topic without opening and slogging through a dozen web sites.

This is the power of collaborative news networks. By forming a network, newsrooms can discover not just a greater volume of news, but a greater volume of relevant, high-quality news than one person, one newsroom, or one wire service could alone.

Compare the Washington group’s great waflood link roundup to a Google News search for “Washington flood” — I know which one I’d rather have as a resource if I lived in that area.

Doing this isn’t complicated. In an email, Brianne described the extent of her planning: “I follow the others on Twitter, and they had started a hashtag, #waflood, and then mentioned using the same tag for publish2 links.”

That’s it! Any group of news organizations can do this, even if they’re not Twitter-friends.

A good way to start is to set up a Publish2 newsgroup and invite other journalists (as Angela did with a Northwest News newsgroup in December). Collaboratively save links about a couple of non-breaking-news subjects to get a feel for it, and try publishing feeds of those links. Then when a big story breaks, it’s a simple matter of choosing a common tag and alerting everyone in the newsgroup.

Don’t get hung up on worries about sinking a lot of time or money into this. As Angela said, “There’s a perception that with some tools, it’s a lot of extra work, but — I’m specifically talking about the Publish2 model — when you realize how little time it really takes to bookmark a page you’re already reading, it’s a wonder you weren’t doing it before.”

As for money, when the technology is free all you need to invest in is smart journalists. Here’s what Paul had to say Wednesday:

I think it’s worth pointing out that everything we did today cost us $0.

That, too, is the spirit of journalism’s future. I can’t wait to see what this innovative crew cooks up next in that spirit — and who will be the first to follow their lead.

Jack explains it best:

Here’s the best Tennessee election coverage that can be found on the Internet.

A bold statement, but arguably true.

I’m changing up this weekend’s blog roundup to list not what bloggers are posting, but links that bloggers are bookmarking. Think of it as read what they’re reading.

A small group of Tennessee bloggers and journalists are experimenting with a new way of organizing election news in something called the “Publish2 Election News Network.”

It’s a groundbreaking experiment in group collaboration to cover the election and it is happening in Tennessee first.

The bloggers/journalists are using a special Web site to “bookmark” the best coverage they can find on the Tennessee primaries, drawing from any sources, mainstream media sites like newspapers and TV stations and bloggers.

The bookmarks flow into a group list and you can the latest picks here and on other sites like TennViews and KnoxViews (see the left side of both of those sites).

Here’s how participant blogger Joe Powell conceptualized it: ” … we know some people will relay to us some sound and reasoned thought and some people relay less than sound ideas. What’s new is translating that concept into the uses and usage out here on the Wild, Wild Web. It’s more than just adding a human editor to search engine algorithms, it’s also about how we structure and understand the world around us.”

Here are the participants, including Knoxville Blog Network bloggers (some left, some right):

• Jack Lail, Managing Editor/Multimedia, Knoxnews.com, JackLail.com
• Mike Silence, Reporter/Blogger, Knoxnews.com, No Silence Here
• Trace Sharp, Newscoma
• Randy Neal, KnoxViews, TennViews
• Russ McBee, RussMcee.com
• Joe Powell, Cup of Joe Powell
• Ben Cunningham, Taxing Tennessee
• Bob Krumm, BobKrumm.com
• Les Jones, LesJones.com

Call it networked journalism — call it networked news. Also call it a robust editorial product (notice the ads on the knoxnews.com election headline page).

It’s also distributed journalism — I currently have the Knoxnews.com election headlines running in the sidebar to the ride. (We’ve got widgets!)

Newspapers and journalism need more people like Jack who are not afraid to take risks, think big, and turn on a dime to make innovative things happen.

Here’s an overview of the Publish2 Election News Network, which I’ll be updating as it evolves.

It’s not too late to emulate what Knoxnews.com is doing for Tuesday — if you’re interested, email me at scott.karp (at) publish2 (dot) com and I’ll get you set up in snap. It’s free! You can register for Publish2 here.

In the age of limited, monopoly distribution, editors were able to focus exclusively on the product of their own newsrooms, because that was the only content their readers could get in most cases. Now that the web and search has made ALL content from EVERY source easily accessible, many media brands are realizing they can’t just be in the business of creating their own content — they need to bring their readers the ENTIRE universe of content on the web.

A number of traditional media brands have already started curating content from other news organizations — these efforts typically employ a traditional, command-and-control, single editor model, but they nonetheless represent a sea change in the disposition of news organizations towards content produced inside their walls vs. content produced outside their walls. In a networked media world, no content brand can do it all by themselves — news consumers, empowered by search and news aggregators, know this, and that’s what’s driving news organizations to take this radical step.

For example, BusinessWeek.com has launched a new feature called Executive Summary, which aggregates the top business stories of the day, mostly from sources OTHER THAN BusinessWeek:

Here’s how BusinessWeek describes the Executive Summary:

The Executive Summary is BusinessWeek’s daily roundup of the most important business news from around the Web. Edited by Chi-Chu Tschang, the early edition is posted every weekday by 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. An afternoon edition, edited by Harry Maurer, is available by 3 p.m. EST.

Another excellent example is the Anchorage Daily News’ Alaska Newsreader:

ADN editors find the news from all over Alaska every morning so you don’t have to.

Time.com has been publishing for a while now a blog called The Ag (short for the Aggregator), which takes a similar approach.

BusinessWeek, Anchorage Daily, Time and many other news organizations have wisely realized that if they want to remain a principal daily destination for their readers, they need to do more than publish their own original content — there are too many other high quality content sources on the web — too many for news consumers to get their arms around. That’s why there’s a huge value creation opportunity for editors to curate ALL the news, not just what their own news organization can produce.

That said, what these first brave forays into news aggregation miss is the opportunity to harness the power of the web, to extend the editorial reach and enhance the editorial intelligence by taking a networked approach rather than a traditional siloed approach. A single editor can only read a limited number of sources, and can only post the aggregation once a day.

But imagine, instead, many editors and journalists collaborating to find and select the most important stories of the day. Image how many more sources they could cover. Imagine the news aggregation updated dynamically throughout the day.

Imagine “the editor” as a powerful networked intelligence, bringing you ALL the news on the web.

The appeal of blogs to marketers is their singular brand identity, making it possible to accurately target their ads. Copeland: “Advertisers say, ‘I know I can trust Blog X, but I also know that Blog X has 100,000 readers – and God knows what those
100,000 readers are going to say.’

This is why completely open systems of “user-generated content,” e.g. social networks like MySpace and Facebook, and social news sites like Digg, still have so little commercial value relative to their scale. It’s not that advertisers don’t value how the web has opened the door to new voices or enabled new, dynamic, networked media models — it’s that they still need a reason to trust these new voices and to trust how these dynamic media operate.

The big problem with open systems is anonymity — when you don’t know who the users are, as in blog comments or on Digg, you can’t really trust or predict in any meaningful way what they might do.

That’s why Copeland praises Gawker Media’s invite-only comment system, where anyone can comment…but only if they EARN the privilege by applying to be a commenter:

He praised Gawker publisher Nick Denton for maintaining a controlled environment around its sites’ various comment pages. For one thing, Gawker Media requires commenters to formally apply and those that break the rules can have their commenting privileges immediately revoked.

As competition intensifies for a share of the online advertising pie — especially for a share of big brand advertising dollars, which are still mostly spent on trusted offline media — online media companies will need to provide highly trusted environments that brands will feel comfortable with, even in the context of new media models.

Sites built on open systems, which turn content creation and publishing into a free for all, will find it increasingly difficult to get their share of brand advertising dollars. Sites that that can harness the dynamism of the web, and can do so in a defined context that provides advertisers with the right degree of predictability and comfort (think Google search results), will likely be the big winners.

Scoble has a video series on how TechMeme, Mahalo, and Facebook will beat Google. Here’s a brief rundown of some interesting points he makes:

• Humans can judge what’s missing from an aggregation of information on a topic
• The key to effective human filtering is leveraging a “fabric of trusted individuals”/”people who are trusted and credible”
• By connecting these trusted people through a social network, you can leverage that resulting social graph to validate trust and create network effects

(Part II is where Scoble makes his main argument.)

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz takes Scoble to task for some sloppy thinking and other errors related to Google and search, but I look to Scoble not as an architect of new models but as a lightning rod for big trends. And the idea that humans — in particular trusted humans — will play a more overt role in the future of information filtering on the Web is definitely in the air.

It was interesting to see Scoble draw numbers on the board to represent Mahalo’s guides, but then instinctively exemplify them with trusted information filters like Guy Kawasaki, himself, Mike Arrington, and Steve Rubel (who are of course not actually Mahalo guides) — that’s exactly it, and it’s why TechMeme works so well using top bloggers as a proxy for trust.

By using journalists and serious bloggers as a proxy for trust, Publish2 aims to solve the scalability problem that Scoble raises in Part III of his video, by creating a scalable mechanism for identifying the RIGHT people, i.e. people who are trusted and people who are GOOD at filtering the web. We’re going to seed Publish2 with trusted, skilled human editors and then let THEM decide who else to trust.

This gets to a very interesting feature that Paul Graham introduced to Hacker News (previously Startup News), a Digg/Reddit-like submit and vote site:

Of course, it’s easy to have a good site when you start out with a core group of smart users. How do you keep it good as more people find out about it? We think we have an answer to that. We’re going to have a group of human editors who train the system in what counts as a good story. Each user’s voting power will then be scaled based on whether they vote for good stories or bad ones. This should protect us against the arrival of users who vote up dumb stories. The worse stuff a user upvotes, the less effect their future votes will have. And vice versa: someone who consistently recommends interesting stories will be rewarded with a louder voice.

Imagine that. Some people vote for “dumb” stories. Other people have better judgment about what is a good story — so Paul is putting human editors in place to make sure that only the humans who are actually GOOD at judging news can influence the system. I can see this working in a niche topic area like Hacker News, but to scale across every topic, you need a proxy for news judgment — which is what led us to journalists.

The potential advantage of human judgment over computer algorithms seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. Kara Swisher interviews Larry Kramer, and in the last 20 seconds she asks him what’s overhyped, and Kramer answers:

Search is going to wear out over time. Web users want guides. The efficiency of search, which can get sort of better, still lacks the human touch. The human touch will add a lot of value.

We couldn’t agree more (the part about the “human touch” adding a lot of value). Algorithms are fast and can cover a lot more ground than individual human, but they lack a fundamental human gift — judgment.

Of course, human judgment is what powers Google PageRank, via human link patterns, but the judgment is implicit, rather than explicit, as it is in the model that Digg, Del.icio.us Popular, and Reddit pioneered. When you network a large group of trusted, skilled humans — and the network effect kicks in — suddenly you can cover a lot of ground.

The potential for a network of trusted humans to play a big role in the future of the Web is everywhere you look, and it’s why we’re so excited about Publish2.

Please sign up for the beta if you’re interested in being part of Publish2 — it’s just around the corner.