Editors: Prepare to lose control of your hyperlinks
Quite a while back, I added the Quick TransLation (qtl) add-on to Firefox. It was launched by Gilad Kutiel and is meant to help you translate and/or define foreign words as you search the web. Since a handful of our clients are in Japan, and since I seem to be forgetting a handful of kanji as each day passes, I downloaded qtl to help me get through the more complicated kanji characters on sites I regularly visit.
The fact that qtl works beautifully and elegantly to help me with international sites isn't why I'm writing about it today. All I do is highlight a character or word, and a small window pops up - that I can control and interact with - that displays the information.
Here's how qtl, and other tools like it, impacts journalism.
You see, after I installed the tool, I noticed that whenever I highlighted a word the qtl window appeared and offered me various choices: a dictionary, a Wikipedia entry, the ability to search that word instantly on Google and Yahoo. It also pulled up content tagged with that word on Flickr, YouTube and Amazon.
What I'm getting at here is that via qtl, your website may be displaying content from other sources - content that you've never seen. Have a look at what I found on the Baltimore Sun's site today:
The thing is, I installed qtl independently. It's a third-party application that delivers content. I happen to find it incredibly useful, but when I highlight a word, I get content displayed on the Sun's site that isn't necessarily approved by editors there.
I was speaking at the Punch Sulzberger program at Columbia last week, and we had a short debate about hyperlinked content and whether it mattered if I could access additional content via the Sun, even if the Sun didn't place it there. My position is that as a user, I love qtl's features and the ability it gives me to find more content and context regardless of what the editors fed to a particular site. But looking from an industry perspective, I'd be weary. It takes control away from the content providers. Example: what newsroom would publish, verbatim, copy from a Wikipedia article without first vetting it?
Qtl isn't the first or only third-party linking content tool that's driven by users. I can guarantee that you'll start to see more just like it.
I'd like for newsrooms to start evaluating these kind of tools, learning more about how they function and then developing smart ways to either exploit - or block - that technology on their own terms.
