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Matt Welch does a fine bit of investigative journalism in Online Journalism Review. A friend of his sent what seemed an obvious email hoax, about an interview US presidential candidates George W Bush and Al Gore gave to the official programme for baseball’s World Series.

Before you click on that second link, read all of Welch. As he says, the interview seems to confirm the common wisdom that Gore is an obsessive, tone-deaf geek, while Bush is an idiot savant.

Incidentally, OJR does a more complete job than any other site I know in peppering its stories with hyperlinks. There are almost too many, but this is far superior to the incomprehensible attitude most sites have of excluding so-called inline links (links within the text, as opposed to appended at the end, or in a column at the side).

I suspect some sites don’t do inline links because it takes more time than just straight text, but most avoid it because of a misplaced fear that readers will leave their site for somewhere else. Guess what? They’ll leave anyway. If you provide them with connections to useful material, they’ll keep coming back.

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