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Comment by jknupp | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that an article on how to focus, which I read in Readability, contained 28 links. I wonder if this was an intentional assualt by the author to prove his point.

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The article isn't about how to narrowly focus on one and only one minuscule thing (reading one article), it's about focusing on one and only one task (reading a blog post in this case, which typically implies the availability of related links), and more importantly, how to train your attention span so that it lasts longer than the usual couple minutes.

My thoughts exactly. Out of those 20 links, the author expressly asked the reader to click at least one link to understand his point. And that was a link to a picture that a good article could have easily embedded inside his article.

I guess without proper "paid" media, articles of this quality is all we get.

It's a matter of preference I suppose. Ultimately, I tend to keep images out and stick with links because it gives users more control. I feel like a big image there will have everyone rushing to see the screenshot, whereas someone can open it up in a new window to get the point with minimal flow distraction.

Regardless, I use links because I think I ought to be doing you the service of linking to my original sources -- usually well founded research -- rather than just presuming that I'm to be trusted.

A link isn't distracting. You clicking on it is. We need articles with more links to background information, not less. See:

http://infovegan.com/2010/06/19/bloggers-and-bills

I appreciate links to sources, but links are definitely distracting. Even if you don't click on it, a link forces your mind to imagine what's at the other end of that link and make a decision about whether it's worth clicking on.

If you frequently link to many sources within a single post, it might be better to use superscripts and link to sources at the bottom (which, incidentally, is how PG does it). These are still distracting, but considerably less so when they're used exclusively for citations, as opposed to digressions.

I had the same thought when I tried to read "Getting Things Done". The text is sprinkled with small info boxes of wisdom, which made it next to impossible for me to focus on reading the text. That really amused me at the time.

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