What are the linkable nouns of blogging?

I am a very linky blogger: if I can hyperlink a noun in something I’m writing, I generally will. As evidence: there are 32,250 links in the 11,096 posts here. I consider this not only a service to the reading public, but also a part of what being a blogger is about, helping to weave connections, pathways through the infinite ether.

The question on my mind, often, is what to link to. There are categories of nouns that I wish there was a more generally-accepted canonical destination for on the web.

Books

Books, for example. Whistler, by Ann Patchett, was just released (I’m 4/5 of the way through; it’s very good). If I want to link to it, do I link to:

• The book’s page on her website?
• The book’s page on her US publisher’s website?
• The book’s Wikipedia page?
• The book’s WorldCat page?
• The book’s Open Library page?
• The book’s page at ISBN.nu?
• The book’s page on Bookshop.org?
• The book’s page at Bookmark, my local bookstore?
• The book’s page in my local library catalogue?

Open Library has always been my preference, and it’s the clear emotional choice: it’s run by the Internet Archive, its mission is “one web page for every book ever published,” and it was founded by Aaron Swartz. But its software seems trapped in 1995 and it never seems to have gained traction on a Wikipedia-like way (it seldom shows up in web search results when looking for a book). I remain unsure.

I’ve linked to Open Library book pages 34 times.

Places

Places are perhaps the category of nouns that I link to most often, and I’ve settled on OpenStreetMap as my canonical destination for these links. The upside is that OpenStreetMap is open, so it can be enhanced and kept up to date by the commons, it’s free from advertising, and it’s the map service that’s increasingly my go-to for accurate routing. 

The downside is that linking to an OpenStreetMap page, like this one for the Weird Harbour coffee shop, for example, seems like linking to the source code for something, rather than a human-focused actually useful destination. I remain unsure.

I’ve linked to OpenStreetMap places 133 times.

People

It used to be that the way you linked to someone was to link to their blog. Easy. But of course not everyone has a blog, and not everyone’s blog will be around forever. 

People have Instagram pages and Facebook pages, but it always seems wrong to link to those, and I feel icky all over when I do.

Some people have Wikipedia pages, and some people have a Wikidata record (here’s mine), and I’ll generally link to those absent any other compelling destination, but that’s a small slice of people too. There’s ORCID for researchers (here’s mine), and VIAF for authors (here’s mine), but those are also a small slice.

At one point I solved this problem by maintaining the Rukapedia, which had a list of people in it that I tried, fruitlessly, to keep up to date and current. And then I gave up.

I remain unsure.

I have no idea how many people I’ve linked to, because I’ve never had a standard method.

The Semantic Web

Part of the reason I think about this to the (unusual?) extent that I do is that in addition to the 11,000+ posts I’ve written here over 26 years being a corpus, those posts also contain a treasure house of information books, people, places and other things. Because this treasure house remains just text, it lacks the structure that would allow me to treat it as a resource that I could explore by navigating its hidden network (“what books have I written about?”, “what are the places I’ve visited in Berlin?”, and so on).

There is a longstanding vision for this vision of a “semantic web,” a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web itself:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web”, which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

That was written in 1999, when “intelligent agents” was still at the “people have touted for ages” point; now we are there, and I wonder how the utility of what Berners-Lee imagined back then might have evolved as a result.

What are your linkable nouns on the web?