Semidelinkification, Shirky-style

Call me a nostalgist, but sometimes I like to plop my hoary frame down in front of the old desktop and surf the world wide web - the way we used to do back in the pre-Facebook days of my boyhood, when the internet was still tragically undermonetized. I was in fact on a little surfin' safari this morning when I careened into a new post from Clay Shirky about - you guessed it - the future of the news biz.* It was totally longform, ie, interfrigginminable. But I did manage to read a sizable chunk of it before clicking the Instapaper "Read Later" button (a terrific way to avoid reading long stuff without having to feel guilty about it). It was a solid piece, as you'd expect from Shirky, if marred a bit by an unappealing new-media elitism (apparently the great unwashed never made it past the sports pages). But what interests me at the moment is not the content of Shirky's post but its form, particularly the form of its linkage. It's been a while since I wrote about delinkification, but it's still an issue I struggle with: How does one hang on to the benefits of having...