Galitsky, Boris / Levene Mark, On
the economy of Web links: Simulating the exchange process, firstmonday.dk:
"In the modern Web economy, hyperlinks have already attained monetary value
as incoming links to a Web site can increase its visibility on major search
engines. Thus links can be viewed as investment instruments that can be the
subject of an exchange process. In this study we build a simple model performed
by rational agents, whereby links can be bought and sold. Through simulation we
achieve consistent economic behaviour of the artificial Web community and
provide analysis of its micro– and macro–level parameters. In our
simulations we take the link economy to its extreme, where a significant number
of links are exchanged, concluding that it will lead to a winner take all
situation."
Walker, Jill, Links
and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web:
"Search engines like Google interpret links to a web page as objective,
peer-endorsed and machine-readable signs of value. Links have become the
currency of the Web. With this economic value they also have power,
affecting accessibility and knowledge on the Web."
Harrison, Claire, Hypertext
Links: Whither Thou Goest, and Why, firstmonday.dk:
"The link is the basic element of hypertext, and researchers have long
recognized that links provide semantic relationships for users. Yet little
work has been done to understand the nature of these relationships,
particularly in conjunction with the purposes of organizational/informational
Web sites. This paper explores the semantic and rhetorical principles
underlying link development and proposes a systematic, comprehensive
classification of link types that would be of use to researchers and Web
production teams."
Pennock, David/ Flake, Gary/
Lawrence, Steve/ Glover, Eric/ Giles, C. Lee, Winners
don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web:
"As a whole, the World Wide Web displays a striking "rich get
richer" behavior, with a relatively small number of sites receivinga disproportionately large share of hyperlink references and traffic.However, hidden in this skewed global distribution, we discovera
qualitatively different and considerably less biased link distributionamong
subcategories of pages for example, among all universityhomepages
or all newspaper homepages."
April 24, 2002:
Dean, Katie / Mayfield, Rotten
Links Hamper Learning, Wired:
"After 20 months, 18.8 percent of the total links had disappeared. Over
11 percent of dot-org links, 18.4 percent of dot-edu pages and 42.5 percent
of dot-com addresses were lost since the study began."
Foot
/ Schneider / Dougherty / Xenos / Larsen, Analyzing
Linking Practices: Candidate Sites in the 2002 US Electoral Web Sphere:
"The article examines "the linking practices exhibited on Web sites produced
by U.S. Congressional candidates during the 2002 campaign season, focusing on
the extent and development of links from candidate Web sites to other types of
political Web sites during the three months prior to the November, 2002 election"
and offers "preliminary insights and a possible empirical model for
managing the conceptual, methodological, and technological challenges entailed
in developmental analysis of link-mediated relations."
Thelwall, Mike, What is this link doing here? Beginning
a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic hyperlink creation:
"The purpose of this paper is to begin a fine-grained process of
differentiating between creation motivations for links in academic Web sites and
citations in journals on the basis that they are very different phenomena."