Huffington Handles: Linking, Etc.

As you might've guessed, The Huffington Post links like most blogs do. On any given story, external links are simply part of the copy. It does sometimes vary as to whether an article will highlight an appropriate phrase within a sentence or more pointedly distinguish a link like this:

This story would be an example.

Point is, The Post does a capable job of clearly defining links and establishing what they are so I'm not blindly surfing, which is helpful. I prefer this kind of linking, though I think there may be some better way to do things that has not yet been developed. Putting a table of links at the top of a story is counterintuitive because it both takes users off the site and exposes readers to sites without any context or understanding as to why they should be looking at it. Placing them at the bottom of a story is better, but if I want to immediately see for myself what the writer is talking about, I don't want to have to skip ahead through half the story and then find my way back. If I had my way, there might be some sort of link table on the side that follows the user as they scroll. Either way, though, so long as I can middle-click a link and open it in a new tab without leaving the original page, I'm satisfied.

This is just one of numerous ways The Post mirrors typical blogs, from the prominently displayed comments section on every story to the related articles section and the buttons to share on every social bookmarking site in existence. Most of these are features I won't use, but they're generally kept out of the copy so I can't bedgrudge The Post too much for having them, as they clearly have some fans.