Like most bloggers, I think I tend to take the power of the link for granted. I write things, I link to other bloggers and to websites, etc. etc. — that’s how it works, right? Carry on — nothing to see here. And yet, every now and then something comes along that reinforces just how powerful a simple link can be. The latest example was a post I came across at The Blog Herald, written by Jason Kaneshiro, who writes a blog at Webomatica.com.

Not to get too self-referential or anything, but Jason talks in the post about how a link from me helped inspire him in his early days as a blogger, a topic that he arrived at after reading a similar post by Lorelle Van Fossen of WordPress, called “Changing a Life With a Link.” I have to say that Jason’s post means a lot to me — in fact, his post may even have as much significance to me as my original link did to him. And yet, I gave virtually no thought to the link when I posted that original item to my blog. I had no idea who Jason was, or what his blog was all about (although I did check out a few of his posts to get a sense of who he was). I just thought he had made a good suggestion, so I linked to it. End of story — or, as it turned out, beginning of story. Apparently a link I gave him made a difference to The Last Podcast as well.

As I mentioned in a comment on Jason’s post, that’s what is so great about the blogosphere. Who Jason was — or how long he had been blogging, or what his background was — was of no interest to me. It was quite literally irrelevant to whether his post made sense or not, just as it was irrelevant to me who Tony Hung was when I first started reading his blog at Deep Jive Interests (Tony is also the editor at The Blog Herald now).

And if nothing else, Jason’s story has reinforced in me the desire to link to as many different voices as possible. I already do my best to find new blogs and links, instead of always linking to TechCrunch or CNET or places like that, but I could do better. I remember my blog friend Kent Newsome (who got mad at me recently for a link I inadvertently removed) had a project called “Second Opinion,” in which he tried to get bloggers to link to new voices, and I thought it was a great idea — and still do. Links are powerful things.

The news that Daylife — the social news-aggregator that Jeff Jarvis is involved with, and craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark has helped financially — has gotten a second round of funding is an optimistic note for the idea of social news, although I’m not quite sure Daylife is there yet (or Newsvine, or Gather.com for that matter). Ashkan Karbasfrooshan says he thinks the perfect media product for the 21st century would be a mix of Techmeme, Digg and Topix.com (which doesn’t get as much attention as I think it deserves).

I think he’s probably right, in the sense that all of those use some combination of “crowdsourcing” and editors/moderators, along with some algorithms (or robots). And that’s why I would argue that when it comes to Stan Schroeder’s question at Mashable — Who Will Bring Us News: Robots, Crowds, or Editors? — the answer should be: All of the above.

Digg takes links that people submit and lets users vote, and also uses algorithms to help determine what gets to the front page; Gabe Rivera uses an algorithm at Techmeme.com, but also tweaks it himself constantly, using his dark geek magic :-) I think it makes sense to use readers as a resource — either to submit news links, or vote on them, or rank them based on clicks or comments, or some combination of all three — but it is also important to have editors who make judgments as well, and algorithms to smooth the process. It doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) just one or the other.

From Press Gazette comes news the the Beeb is sending reporter and techno guru Ben Hammersely to Turkey to cover the election using a number of social networking tools, including his blog, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook:

“The BBC has dispatched reporter Ben Hammersley to spend two weeks using new social media web tools to cover the run-up to the July general election.

He will visit four cities and report for BBC World, World Service radio, News 24 and BBC News online.

In what is a first for the BBC, Hammersley will file to his personal blog, he will upload photos to Flickr, video to YouTube, post snippets of text to the microblogging site Twitter, bookmark research on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and network with people through Facebook.”

Should be interesting to follow this experiment in distributed media. If I were a large media outlet, I would paying very close attention. Ben has a bit more on the deal here.