How not to be a link blogger
Here's a great way to do link blogging wrong - the way Scoble is doing it with his link blog. Why do I say it's the wrong way? A number of reasons:
- Too many posts. He's using drag/drop to dump items he finds of interest, but doesn't want to take the time to actually blog. He's dropping dozens of things this way every day. It's a veritable flood
- Worse, most of them are just bare links with a single word - More.. A handful are partial content. This is just irritating.
I've just unscubscribed from the blasted thing. It's too many items, with no real way to tell if any of them are truly interesting. I can't read them in BottomFeeder immediately, because they are partial (or no) content. Throwing every possible thing you find to be of interest in a minimal link is not only useless, it's aggravating. Scoble's normal blog often acts as a good link blog - he posts things of interest with a small summary quite frequently, and I can tell from his summary whether the linked item is of interest to me - in this regard, Scoble is to the tech sector what Instapundit is to politics - a quick summary of items that may be of interest. The link blog just doesn't work that way. My advice - stop doing it, and go back to concentrating on being a real filter.
The whole exercise is an example of an all too common problem in the IT field - an attempt to find a technical solution to a problem that simply cannot be solved by technology alone.
Comments
Collection of Links or Link Blog?
[Take the First Step] June 22, 2004 7:19:25.660
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Collection of Links or Link Blog?
Robert Scoble's Link Blog is a work in progress. I think your level of satisfaction depends upon whether you see it as a collection of links or a link blog. I suspect that Scoble sees it more as a public collection of links, indexed by time and Google. James Robertson sees it as a link blog and a failure: too many items, with no way to tell if any are interesting. Personally, I'm inclined to agree with Robertson. The S/N isn't worthy of a spot in my aggregator.
Kunal and Scoble are working around their constraints: legal, technical, and practical. I think that they could boost the signal to noise ratio by grouping related links together. Replace the single link folder with several topic folders. Rather than post immediately, create a post-dated draft and append related links to that post. That would provide a little more context to evaluate each entry. It would certainly make it easier to dismiss topics that we aren't interested in....