Do link blogs suck?
Link blogs are one of the truest remnants of the original intent of the weblog: a trail of links that you want to remember and share with other people.
Social bookmarking and microblogging have largely replaced the role of the link blog. Worse still, they can automate the creation of a link blog which seems a bit… redundant to me.
Question: is there still a good reason for the link blog to exist? I’m struggling to find a good justification for a stand-alone link blog when you can publicize the RSS feed for your Delicious page? Or even just your user account page? Isn’t uselessness tantamount to sucking?
What do you think? If you do have a good justification for it, I’d like to hear your thoughts. Otherwise, this little bit of linkbait might just go to waste.
matt Searles:
I must confess that I have never actually encountered a link blog.. but
It seems to me if you make a blog that is basically just a lot of links, you have more curation powers then with micro blogging or social book marking…
A link blog could be something like a record of some of your online adventures.. and in that way it can tell a story that can be a kind of subtext to the links.. that could be a unique attribute to the link blog..
I think this is really the central issue to all of social media.. it's not a question if anything is good or bad.. but what is it good for.. or what is good for you with whatever it is you're trying to do.
I think a problem with best practices is that they have to do with what's the best practice for doing X.. which assumes a kind of ecological context for which the best practice is a crystallization of both that ecological context, and what folks are collectively trying to do. In this way it's really an expression of statistical norms.. but the ecological context is one of flux.. and what do we say of the unique moment? And it seems to me that.. in some special way.. social media is about the unique moment.
6 December 2008, 1:02 pmMark Dykeman:
All fair points. I guess my thought was if the functionality of a link blog can be duplicated effectively and more efficiently via some other tool, then why not use that? I have a bias towards seeing long form entries in blogs, so I wouldn't find a link blog very exciting, especially when they are basically automated feeds from social bookmarking software.
6 December 2008, 1:45 pmAdamSinger:
Twitter/FriendFeed/Digg/Reddit/SU killed the link blog star (imo).
6 December 2008, 5:23 pmMark Dykeman:
Good synopsis.
6 December 2008, 6:54 pmJayCruz:
If you mean using a platform like wordpress or blogger to just putting hypertext, then yes, I agree. If your going to do just that, then something like twitter, digg, or delicious would be a better option. But you could be a good “link blogger”, as in pointing to things you find online, if you offer some context.
6 December 2008, 7:46 pmAri Herzog:
Do you consider Wikipedia a link blog?
7 December 2008, 5:06 amMark Dykeman:
No. In fact, I don't consider Wikipedia to be a blog.
7 December 2008, 5:26 amMark Dykeman:
Context adds value and it is much preferred to a static list of links.
7 December 2008, 5:28 amLinks Roundup - December 9th 2008:
[...] Do link blogs suck? – Do you think that there is still a need for blogs which post about other great sites? [...]
9 December 2008, 6:01 amChipping the web: December 10th -- Chip’s Quips:
[...] Do link blogs suck?I had to link this, natch.Tags: linkblog markdykeman [...]
10 December 2008, 11:01 pmTDavid:
I don't subscribe to or read any *all* linkdump blogs. Some of the blogs I follow run out lists of unreleated links with a few comments here and there, using that delicious plugin most commonly.
I prefer reading — and writing — blog posts with some meat to them. A list of completely unrelated links in a blog post, even with small amount of context added, is usually not very meaty. For readers, the context provided is often too short to be useful. Now a list of related links around a topic is a whole different thing and could be quite useful.
From the author side though, from time to time providing linkdump posts can break up things and provide variety overall to the blog. So these posts are ok here and there. They suck though for SE. How does the SE determine what is relevant on the page in a linkblog post with very little text?
Blogs completely dedicated to linking? I guess maybe if it was something the author wanted for their own use but I don't see many people subscribing. FriendFeed, delicious, et al probably best places these days for that type of regular activity.
11 December 2008, 10:30 amMark Dykeman:
You bring up an excellent point about how search engines would evaluate links with little description.
11 December 2008, 1:17 pmWhy I Write Detailed, In-Depth Posts:
[...] Perhaps you’ve caught on – every post on this blog is a link post. And, instead of providing you a random link post about what I’m reading each week, I manually scour the web for links that relate to the content of each post and include a related links section at the bottom. This way, if you’d like to read further about a topic I have written on, the links are right there, in context. I think it makes more sense to tie each of your posts to other complementary or supplementary posts on other blogs than to do stand-alone link posts. I know some bloggers like to do link posts, but for me, Twitter/FriendFeed/StumbleUpon/Digg/Reddit killed the link blog star. [...]
24 December 2008, 10:34 am