Hating your customers, part (n + 1) : Anti Deep Linking. Wired: Site Barks About Deep Link. Jeez, what is it with these people? “No, go away!” says the Dallas Morning News. “Don’t link to our stories! We don’t want people to be able to find what we’ve written!”

I think that the New York Times through their partnership with UserLand has shown a much more enlightened mode of operating—if you want to build a reputation, make your content more visible, not less. But then, that’s why they are the Times and the others are the Dallas Morning News.

Oh, and by the way, here are some deep links to the DMN articles. The same deep links that got BarkingDog.com in trouble. Link them from your site, won’t you? Let’s push back on this one a little. [jarretthousenorth News]

And why am I not surprised that the DMN site requires all sorts of registration info, and disables my back button on my browser as well. 

This all reminds me of the stories told about the earliest days of motion pictures, when movies were made by putting a camera out in the audience and filming a stage play. It took time to invent the vocabulary and techniques of the modern cinema.

Technology is never neutral. It opens up new possibilities and it takes time to learn how to take full advantage of.  Those with power in the existing way of doing things will always try to make sense of the new in relation to what they know. They will also look for ways to use it to extend their dominance.

While we generally label this behavior as "clueless" I wonder if there isn't some more helpful way to view it. How do we help organization's and management teams extract more useful lessons from these historical lessons?

6:34:16 PM •  • comment