Taking off the radio drama hat for a second, this morning I was writing an article for my company’s Internet Marketing Blog on Building Community for your Blog (yeah, it’s the job that actually pays). A couple of interesting things crossed my mind while writing on this subject and especially about building up liberal linking habits.
The importance of linking to other authors first hit me while working on the supporting materials for Day of the Dead.? One of my essays — the New Orleans one, I think — received a whole slew of red ink from my instructors after they read probably three to four pages of scholarship with limited citations.
Having spent five years in university, you’d think I’d have taken care of this poor habit (in my defense, it was a draft), but the tricky part with this essay is that I was writing from common knowledge. Or, at least what I thought was common knowledge (based on chatting with any number of locals in French Quarter dive bars for the past couple years).
While most of what I wrote turned out to be close to true, it was still important to be able to validate my assertions beyond just “I told you so.” This probably induces a “Well duh” from you, but the point is that linking to other websites is the equivalent technique in Internet terms. Besides providing evidence that you’ve read about the subject (or at least spent a few minutes Googling it), links make it easier for people to sniff out your trail and follow it to distant reaches of the Internet.
And since a lot of these radio drama sites aren’t terribly, er, optimized for maximum search engine performance, linking is ever so much more important for us to keep interested listeners tuned in to the great diversity of producers that are actually out there.
So, inasmuch as I can, I hope to link here to all of the dramatists whose work I find inspiring, and words I find insightful.