That is, unless you want to bold the word, which is another unsung benefit of links – they aid human skim-reading.

I find myself disrespecting people when they link unnecessarily! It's like telling me a restaurant is awesome, only for me to find it's rubbish. Or to find it's not even a restaurant at all. (An example would be Guardian links to their own tags.)

The link will never die for deep links to super-niches. That's the value and joy of specialist knowledge – it will always be in the specific niche recommendations, not the big homepages or Wikipedia articles. But I suppose what's “chemistry” or “USA” to one person could be a totally unknown vista to another. Yes there have been amazing times when a casual link to something opened up a WORLD for me. Increasingly that will happen for young people surely? Imagine being 7-years-old and clicking “jazz” having not seen the word before… Is that possible?

I also find Digg a bit redundant for my own purposes. My Digg is Google and if you want to Digg something, then link to it. I'll see it in your blog post or I'll find it via Google for the niche topic you're discussing.

I just clicked your Choose Your Own Adventure link. Yes there is no way I could have found that specific page otherwise.

But! I think maybe you're implying there's something permanent and definitive about Wikipedia. Its status could change over time. I agree that in 2009 it is very dominant. Maybe we should think of it as another, separate web… I don't mean in size terms, I mean in influence, link juice and traffic.

Here's an idea – try going for a week running a Greasemonkey script that removes Wikipedia from your Google results and see what happens.

Experiments aside, on another level Wikipedia is just another website. It's managed to gather reputation and link juice because of the way it's set up and the good bargain it has with its content creators. But there are problems with it being so dominant.

I'm not sure that's a bad thing. “You can if you want but you're not forced to if you don't” is a reasonable system in which to “surf”, I'd say.

Even then, that's using known, destination sites and trundling around those curated networks – it's structured randomness.

I haven't done so much blogroll hopping recently. Last time it was around the subject of museums/tech which took me down rabbit hole after fascinating rabbit hole. That was good.