Alertbox walled garden
While reading the latest Alertbox on card-sorting, I noticed that Jakob Nielsen rarely links to anyone but himself. "How rarely?" you ask. I counted the links in Alertbox over the last six months (16 columns), and found that out of 98 links in total just seven were external. Here's a table breaking down each link's destination:
Table: Alertbox link destinations, January - July 2004
| Previous Alertbox | Other Useit.com content | NNGroup event or report | Other NNGroup member | External link | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| # of Links | 32 | 5 | 48 | 6 | 7 |
Of those seven external links, four are to the media (NY Times, Slate, WSJ), two are to Amazon (on the same page, since I counted duplicates), and exactly one is to another person (Andrew Monk, who wrote a paper on cellphone behaviour).
None of this would be interesting except that in a frequently cited March 1999 Alertbox on communicating trustworthiness in web design Jakob wrote:
Not being afraid to link to other sites is a sign of confidence, and third-party sites are much more credible than anything you can say yourself. Isolated sites feel like they have something to hide.
There seems to be a lot of skepticism around Nielsen's work; maybe his isolation from the rest of the usability and user experience community, expressed by the lack of external links, is one of the reasons why. Not that a few extra external links would completely mitigate articles of "X is 99% bad" variety, but he might have more supporters if he linked to others in the community.
