Taylor has been
talking about bidirectional links, and actually implemented a
system that shows what's been linking to him (or, perhaps more precisely,
what links have been followed to him). He notes that he won't put the links in the articles referenced. I
can understand this reluctance, as there's no way of knowing
whether a reference is actually relevant to the article being
pointed to, or just a sneaky way to get a link. (Something this
author would never do, of course!) To me, this basically rules
out what could actually be an interesting use of bidirectional links - as
a means of a dialogue between sites. This would be quite unlike
a typical web or email discussion, which tends to happen in one
"place" as far as the reader is concerned. Across sites,
there would be (I think anyways) much more resonance of a dialogue.
Methods could be developed to obviate the use of linking for
reasons other than discussion/comment - perhaps only trusted links
would be refenced, or somesuch. Heck, could bidirectional links
be something built into blogger?
(Of course, I don't personally use blogger, for no good reason.)