On Blogging Part Two Point One (2.1) Linking and Deep Linking

I know that I've promised to return to my series on blogging, and I will, even more than this addendum. Over the past couple of months I've been linked to by some odd places. My post about Coffee People was briefly linked on Diedrich's Google Finance page, which generated some traffic. As previously mentioned, I was linked on Joseph Arthur's website for calling his album and his song "You Are Free" one of the best of 2006. On the other hand, I was also "scraped" for my hands on experience with the Zune for an ad farm and for my essay on the fall of the Portland Trailblazers.
Linking is what makes a blog have more authority in search engines, which aside from having a large family or circle of friends is one of the biggest factors in making your blog feel like it's worth it to spend the time on. Links can come in Blogroll form or just name dropping in a post. Most bloggers obsess over traffic on their blogs, whether they're attempting to make a living at blogging, just being creative, or just blowing off steam. An indirect way of gaining attention from other bloggers is to link to them. This implies you're reading blogs outside of your family and your circle of friends, of course. A number of times when I've linked to someone, the blogger I've linked to has noticed traffic coming to their blog from mine, which leads to them reading my blog, which at times has led to them linking to me (if for no other reason than to say "MKinMotion thinks this about what I think"). I'm pretty horrible about keeping up with a blogroll, but I am working on getting my Google reader organized enough to set up the sharing function of it which will give anyone who wants to know what I'm thinking is cool out on the net. So the lesson of linking is if you want to be linked to, the first thing you can do as a first step is point out who/what you are reading either in your blogroll or in your posts.
Deep linking is a somewhat controversial topic. It's most commonly used to refer to the use of media. For example say you see the latest leaked track from the upcoming Arcade Fire album on someone's blog, deep linking would mean you put a link on your blog not to the other blog or the other blog post, but to the file itself on the other blogger's server. People oppose deep linking because they make their ad money based on how many people visit their site or by the odds of people clicking ad links on their site...basic math says: more people equals more clicks. I don't deep link to text based "Printer Friendly" articles or to media files. I am guilty of deep linking to photographs. In fact most of the photos you see on this blog are deep links from other sites. I generally try to find AP pictures or grab from the biggest source (i.e. Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Amazon and big news sites) or from Wikipedia (I read somewhere that pictures uploaded to Wikipedia become public domain or at least fair use, so that's the story I'm sticking with). Occasionally I link to a photo on Flickr or on a similar site, and even less occasionally I link to a photo on another blog. If I do, I try to figure out who took the picture and give them credit, but it isn't always that easy. If you subscribe to the MKinMotion RSS feed, you'll notice that my post from December of my review of Glen Hansard's show was updated this evening. If you read the comments associated with that post, you'll see Jana say that the picture belongs to them (I'm unsure of Jana's gender and don't want to make any assumptions as the IP address is in the Czech Republic). I knew something was up when I saw several hits coming from a Czech forum for The Frames, but I can't read Czech so I was in the dark until the comment. I updated the post to reflect the photographer and location, and would have included that had I been able to figure it out in December. Most people have the same philosophy as Jana and just want credit. I'd link to Jana, but I was only given a link to the photo and not to a flickr page or a blog. I have the same philosophy about the photos I take, and I know someone out there is deep linked to my photo of the saddest care bear, because I see the traffic floating by.
And now back to the rest of your surfing....while you're at it, check out this for a link.