

AP Finally Learns that You Can Link to Other Sites on the Internet - jsherry
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110720/15543515185/ap-finally-learns-that-internet-you-can-link-to-other-sites.shtml

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jhawk28
They are most likely putting the bitly links in parenthesis so that the story
can be printed as is.

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astrodust
Of all the things they use, bitly is their choice? Idiotic. How hard is it for
them to pick up the phone and get their own short domain service so that their
news postings won't become useless if, for instance, Libya decides to can the
bit.ly domain?

~~~
ramy_d
Exactly, for crying out loud their domain is <http://ap.org> and they couldn't
figure to do <http://ap.org/l/pDHZ6h>

how ridiculous.

~~~
k33l0r
Hell, they could have just subscribed to bit.ly's Pro or Enterprise service
and used their own domain...

Unless AP has some sort of agreement with bit.ly, this would seem to be a
pretty big win for bit.ly. Lots of new visibility.

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senthil_rajasek
AP is a co-op, From their about page
[<http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html>]

"AP is a not-for-profit news cooperative"

The techdirt article makes it sound like AP just figured out how to hyperlink.

If you read the original article,[[http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/ap-will-
link-back-to-newspa...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/ap-will-link-back-to-
newspapers-who-get-scoops/)]

its easy to see that that AP is proposing to link the actual story (scoop)
from its member news organizations and only from their member news
organisations.

Running as a non-profit co-operative news organisation presents its own set of
challenges other than just technical, I guess.

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afiler
If they didn't put links in parentheses, they might break compatibility with
teletypes! ...I'm not actually suggesting any newspaper still uses actual
teletype machines, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are still plenty of
workflows that evolved from teletype use.

The teletype and Baudot code do have a pretty amazing legacy. Baudot code was
invented in 1870 as a 5-bit mode-shifting character set. This, of course,
predates data processing with punch cards (1889), alphanumeric data processing
(1929), and binary computers (1937-1941). Even after the introduction of
ASCII, the smaller Baudot character set remained a common subset available on
a wider range of machines. This is seen in C's "trigraphs", where ??/, for
example, may be substituted for \ on machines that don't support that
character. Even the Apple II+ had a teletype-style keyboard, supporting only
the characters found in Baudot code (the Apple IIe keyboard was the first to
support all of the 7-bit ASCII characters).

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rglover
Hm. Being that the AP is a major competitor for my current project
(<http://www.getconduit.com>), I can't help but smile at this. In regard to
the parenthesis, I can understand to some extent with printing of scripts and
what not, but based on the original article here (<http://bit.ly/nEmkQS> <\--
See what I did there), it seems like it was a lack of effort more than
anything.

~~~
joshu
thank you to the link to a sign-up page

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j_baker
The publishers that use the AP tend to be _deathly_ afraid of anything that
might lead users away from their sites, so I'm not surprised to see that they
haven't used hyperlinks until now. That said, I have no idea why they chose
bit.ly, although part of me suspects this is some sort of covert advertising
campaign that bit.ly is paying the AP for.

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zipdog
I'm not sure if its a reason for their reluctance to do this earlier, but
reporters tend to dislike updating their stories once posted (its better to
write new copy), and links often have to be watched, because the serving site
may change its urls or worse (if it were particularly annoying) place
different copy at the linked page

~~~
pavel_lishin
And the different copy may include something that would look pretty bad for
the linking party; e.g., "AP claimed they were linking to a Boston Globe story
about the Tea Party, but instead it was something about a Lemon Party! And it
didn't look like the kind of party I want to attend at all!!"

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mrpollo
they are probably using bit.ly because its hiding the domain name of the other
sites, as to not give free promotion.

LOL

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petervandijck
omg you can LINK??

