[nbadg]

The critiques you raise against Wikipedia, both here and in the linked post -- skeuomorphism, functional fixation, aversion to rich/embedded content, etc -- I think are very apt.

I'll echo eponeponepon's comment: very sincerely, it's an elegant approach, but what happens with more than 2 links? In particular, (and this is already a concern with only the two links), do you have any UI cues that those links are separate? Because I'd be concerned (I'm paranoid about this on reddit) that, without additional UI cues, it seems like they're the same link. Amusingly I had this exact problem on your blog post, even though I'd already read the explanation: in the final "Barack Obama signs Minimum Wage executive order" I was expecting the orange link highlight on "Barack Obama signs" to be one link, and the black "Minimum Wage executive order" to be another, despite having just read subject vs verb linking.

Might I suggest two link classes with slightly different CSS colors? If you're already using automatic page formatting and link generation, you could just alternate between the two classes, thereby providing an immediate visual cue that they're different links.

[spc476]

I've done that for my blog (http://boston.conman.org/) where darker colors refer to links "further away" (brightest are internal links to other blog entries, darker are links to external sites) although the effect may be too subtle.

It also only helps if the reader knows of this (and in my case, that's pretty much been me).

[sparkzilla]

It's a bit confusing. It's probably best to underline the external links.

[sparkzilla]

Thank you for the compliment. I was looking at the Barack Obama link too and thinking the same thing. Either using different colors, or a small popup that gives more information, would work.