I was so happy for Greg when I saw that the Wall Street Journal had written an article about a post of his, the one about the redesigned Presidential Daily Brief. I know the feeling, well, at least I nearly do.

However, while his redesign of the PDB is apparently interesting enough to write an article in the WSJ about, and to interview three design "gurus" about, it is apparently not interesting enough to provide a link to. Because while Greg's post about the PDB redesign, and the PDB redesign itself, is the one and only topic in the article, it isn't linked to from the article itself. Nothing is.

But I wasn't surprised. Not at all. Because they never link. Newspapers I mean, when they write about a web page they never link to it. Of course, the paper edition couldn't, because it's paper, but the online edition could, and they should. I'm sure there are a few exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, online editions of newspapers never link to the web pages they write about. Sometimes they mention the URL to the main web site, but most often they don't.

It's kind of eery; this collective behaviour of theirs, to not link to the web page an article of theirs is about. Why did they all make this collective decision to not link? The behaviour does seem limited to online editions of newspapers, specifically, as opposed to the other kinds of news oriented websites which aren't just a complement to the main paper edition, often many decades old.

Is it just because they don't "get" the web? Is it just because they're adapting their paper content to the web without really considering the possibility that the web is a different medium with different possibilities, restrictions and scope? Or is it a conscious choice? We shalt not link, for linking is bad?

Several years ago, during what might be considered the pre-teen years of the web, what I like to call the Portal Period, content providers designed their websites, or "portals" as they were called then, around the inexorable principle that everything is about keeping the visitor from leaving the site. They charged banner advertisements not by the click, like they mostly do today, but by the impression. Everything was about keeping the visitor from leaving the site, sorry, the Portal.

Whatever you wanted to do on the net, they wanted you to do it at their Portal. Read news, check your e-mail, build your own homepage, chat, whatever. Stay right here and do it at our Portal. Don't leave. This mindset, this internet strategy, has among business insiders become much less commonly adhered to, one might perhaps even say that the Portal is dead and buried, and that everybody knows that it was a stupid mistake to begin with, but hey, we were young.

But the idea that linking is bad, for the reason that it makes the visitor leave the site (and them leaving the site is horrible), is alive and still thriving. It's as if business insiders, those who create and launch big web projects, have all realized that while no single website can do everything; and while the Portal concept is flawed; and while the visitor must and will have to leave the website eventually; they still do everything in their power to at least not encourage visitors to leave the website. In other words, they don't link.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that marketing their URL, their dot-com web address, costs them money. Making people come to their website is expensive. Linking to other websites, "just like that", is perhaps, thought of as wasting that money. Their sponsors pay big money to be featured on their website, perhaps, in their mind, just randomly linking people left and right dilutes that value.

They could be right. But they're definately also wrong. I think that it is fairly safe to say that the bigger the website is the bigger is also the chance that they will not link to the interesting stuff that their articles are about. It's a Big-Website-Syndrome; to cling to the idea that linking is bad, looking past the possibility that links are resources, resources which their visitors appreciate. Visitors tend to return to websites which they appreciate. To them, however, that concept is outside of the box of thought.

I e-mailed the journalist at WSJ who wrote the article about Greg Storey's redesign of the PDB. She replied, conceded that not including the website address in the article was "an oversight", and she gave it to me. I replied, said thanks, but I've been a reader of Greg's for over two years, I know the URL, but most people who read her article don't.

No reply yet, and it wouldn't surprise me if the article isn't updated with the link either. Because then their readers might leave the website. And leaving the website is bad. Real bad.

Update: Holy crap Batman! They've now added a link to Greg's website. All is well.

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