Alex Kirtland and I have an article published in the online web design magazine Boxes and Arrows about how to design online reputation and rating systems. Check it out here.

Check out this article in BusinessWeek about Twitter. The article itself is pretty ordinary, but look at the spectacular number of hyperlinks it contains. In fact, there are so many links that the article is hard to read and I gave up.

I was wondering why having too many links in an article can be bad. I think it’s because when you encounter a link during reading, you have to think a little. What is this link about? Should I click it? Too many links makes for too much of this type of thinking, which makes reading the article hard. Also, the blue colour and underline of links is distracting. With so many distractions from the links, I couldn’t concentrate on what the BW writer was trying to say.

I wonder what the optimal ratio of links to words is. By my count, the BW article contains about 1,200 words and 42 links. My gut feeling says that one link per 100 words is about the maximum you’d want to have for a regular article.

(HT: Web 2.0…Really?)

This has nothing to do with economics, but anyways … You know the crosshair cursor that you use for selecting things or drawing diagrams, e.g. in Word and Powerpoint? This cursor is really annoying to use because when you click and drag, it’s hard to make the selection area or drawing object exactly where you want. For example say you had this screenshot of Google’s logo and you want to select it in a drawing program:

Oops … Often you don’t get the crosshairs in quite the right place. Here you can see on the left I’ve chopped off part of the logo. Then you have to try again or fiddle with something to get it right.

This problem would go away if the crosshairs had some faint guide lines extending from the cursor across the screen, then you could position the cursor correctly before you start selecting:

Are there programs that do this?