From the Society for News Design annual workshop comes a top 10 for digital journalists, with the tenth brought to us by time machine, straight from August 6, 1991.

Summarized by professor of online journalism and former Washington Post Digital Ink illuminati Mindy McAdams, that important anachronism was:

10. Realize the power of links. You might think that's ridiculously obvious, but in the news business, plenty of people still don't get it. (Amy Gahran blogged about this last week.)

More patient by far than I, Mindy did not note the capacity print publication staff members have for self-destructive refusal to seize opportunities. Even opportunities that lie around for a decade and a half, begging to be seized. There has never been anything to lose. Indeed, in 1997 Jakob Nielsen listed use of outbound hypertext links as a credibility building imperative in writing for the Web.

Yet news organizations still often fail to see that External Links from Stories Are a Service, Not a Threat, and as a result persist in sabotaging themselves by failing to provide outward bound links whenever a constructive opportunity presents itself.

Gahran is on target when she says:

In online media, relevant links are always a service. In fact, if you mention something in a story for which you could include a relevant direct link and fail to do so, you're probably only going to frustrate and eventually alienate your online audience.

She is writing for a community of the obstinately unpersuaded, whose capacity for ignoring the facts of Web product deployment is well-documented. As a result, I can forgive her for writing "probably." I have no doubt she is sincere.

My own experience with and study of online products leads me to write and say "inevitably."

The productivity of using links and the inevitable alienation of users that results from the failure to use them fully makes realizing the power of links a necessity for any Web-based information product.

Don't, and you're dying.

Go to the most common number one recommendation for Web content publishers, and you can see that argument to the contrary is altogether vacant.

Currently the most commonplace number one recommendation, and listed as number one by presenters at the Society for News Design annual workshop is (again from Mindy):

1. Your audience needs to be your co-author. Or rather, you need your audience to be your co-author(s). Example: Paris riots on Flickr.

Nurturing and supporting an audience which co-authors your publication, without making full use of outward-bound and other links is, pun intended, a virtual impossibility.