Annotating Web Links

As a courtesy to channel goers and the hard-working moderators, please be sure to annotate any links you post in #AAR with a minimal description of what you're linking to. For instance, rather than pasting a naked link:

leftnut> http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/01/ban_unconstitutional/index.html

on a line all by itself, mark it with a brief phrase:

leftnut> Federal judge rules partial-birth abortion ban unconstitutional: http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/01/ban_unconstitutional/index.html

Even if the subject can be partly inferred from the link, it's less likely to draw the notice of users or the blog moderators without a description. This is especially true for garbled links
(http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000102&sid=aSRAXJBOQmkk) and shortened links (http://www.tinyurl.com/ysuqx) that don't suggest any context by themselves.

If your link points to a news article, its headline is frequently suitable as a description. If it's to a blog thread, start with the name of the blog plus the thread's topic. Links to static webpages may be marked up with the page's title if it is sufficiently descriptive.

Note: Once you've annotated your link in a descriptive and interesting way, there isn't a need to post excerpts of the article or page to the channel. Please refrain from flooding!