Clay Shirky's recent bashing of the Semantic Web has generated a lot of comments, several from defenders of this planned utopia. Kevin A. Burton, one such supporter, writes the following as a postscript to a rant on Clay's piece (via Internet Alchemy):
I used tinyurl.com for the URL to shirky's article so it wouldn't be included in pagerank, daypop, etc. I'm going to start doing this to articles I find suboptimal. Consider it a negative cert (or lack of approval).
Using TinyURL, a URL-shortening service primarily useful for creating manageable pointers to replace long URLs in e-mail messages, to reduce the visibility of Clay's article ignores the not-so-startling truth: weblog indexes help us find popular articles, not popular ideas. Daypop, for example, is worthwhile because it shows us not only what the Web likes, but often, what it dislikes.
Kevin's disservice is not only to the articles he non-links, but also himself, since he's rendering his own site unreachable via services like Technorati, which link back to comments on popular articles.
It's unavoidable: articles important enough for comments are important enough for links. Hiding your link doesn't make a site any less popular; it only makes it harder for the rest of us to know it.