What if people linked? Dave Winer says that linking is a core value of the web (it's pretty far in, but he has some interesting things to say). Early pages linked everywhere. Now people publish articles online and they're reluctant to link. His statement at Bloggercon last year (I've been listening to the podcasts from there for a while now) was that if you talk about something and don't link to it, you've violated a core value of the web.

I know this can be taken to the extreme, where you spend more time finding the appropriate target for every link than you do actually stating your opinion, but I think many sites are far too shallow in their links. I'm sure that some of this has to do with preserving pagerank and some of it has to do with the perceived advertising value of a link. I don't think those are acceptable excuses though. It's not unusual for a news site to even go as far as to publish a url without making it a link.
There's good reasoning behind the 'core value' statement. The web is the only medium that has links. Links are what makes hypertext unique. When authours don't link, they reduce the value of the web. I guess the idea must've really resonated with me - it's been at least two weeks since I heard that podcast and I still felt the need to repeat the thought. Have a listen to the podcast and see what you think, I have to warn you though that it starts off slow and drifts down a lot of other tangents. I found that it reminded me that there's more to the web than just search.