It's an interesting place, the web.

I was looking over my referer logs the other day, and I saw a new link to my old article about what's wrong with Instant Messaging. Following it, I found somebody's class assignment: the author had linked to my article, but I thought had misrepresented in her link text what I was actually saying. So I sent off a quick email to that effect, clarifying what I had really meant.

This, of course, took the poor student somewhat by surprise. Not the least because I tend to write rather formally to strangers, and it may have (unintentionally) sounded like I was annoyed. But anyway, you don't really expect, when you reference someone's writings in your obscure school assignment, to have the author write back and correct you.

Thanks to the referer header, linking on the web is not a passive reference, but an invitation to converse. A site may ignore the invitation, but it's always there, fed by each browser that follows the link. It's one of the things that makes the web a social arena instead of just a publishing medium.

Sufficient linking, as David Weinberger observed in Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, creates spontaneous communities, as people with related interests engage in more extended conversations.

I like it that way. If publishing on the web were merely throwing your links into the void, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun.