Scoble left a comment on Saturday morning requesting a link to a video of his. Admittedly, I didn't notice it until Monday morning. The video is 40 minutes long and provides a tour of one of Intel's fabs where the 45nm chips will be manufactured. It's a fine video, but the big news about Intel's the High-k and metal gates transistors is tucked away about 20-25 minutes into the video, way beyond my attention span. And even then, if offers largely the same information that is offered elsewhere. If Scoble would have pasted the link in his comment, I would have left it there.

We linked to news copy that we at vnunet.com produced ourselves (full disclosure: this blog is published by vnunet.com, currently part of the Nielsen Company (formerly called VNU) and soon to be owned by 3i). Because we feel that the copy is relevant to our readers.

If the latter is the case, Scoble is simply wrong. We do link to blogs if we feel that they provide relevant information that is accurate and verifiable, or if we use blogs as a source for a story – both on this blog and in our news coverage on vnunet.com.

A story that we fact checked and researched ourselves by definition is more verifiable to us than any blog posting. The sole exception would a blog posting by the Intel engineer who invented the technology (but even then we will often verify the authenticity of the posting with Intel's PR department). In this case our news story provided relevant information, so we linked to it instead of the NY Times or Podtech.net (Scoble's current employer, which had a reporter present at the Intel event).

Yes, we like traffic to our websites because it helps us pay the bills. So if all other factors are equal, we'll still link to our own content first. But we don't have a 'no linking' policy.

If Scoble claims that in general we should just link to blogs instead of established media, that's fine too. We appreciate his input and we'll continue to link to blogs if they information they provide is accurate, verifiable and relevant to our readers. Which is what we've always been doing.

Any discussion about how established media deal with emerging media is one worth having. But it seems that we are singled out for the wrong reasons.

I just hope that somehow I'm completely missing Scoble's point, in which case I'm sure that he'll find the comment section below. Otherwise, we'd happily continue to link to blogs when needed.

UPDATE:

Scoble seems to have come to his senses: "Raising a stink doesn’t bring the traffic"