B. Mann Consulting

Seems like lots of people are talking about link logs or link lists posted to their blogs, and whether or not people find them useful.

Darren explains his thoughts on daily links, and asks for feedback on whether his readers like them (he himself admits the link round ups were "probably [not] that compelling to me in the first place". Feedback for Darren: only do it if it is useful to you. I might very well subscribe to a feed of your links if you offered them, as they are fairly easy to skim in a newsreader. But, they don't really draw people back to your site, so only do it if *you* want to. Or, do both: integrate them directly into your site (or sync them), but make it a separate feed/archive that people can pay attention to or not as they choose.

I've manually posted a few link round ups over time, but never used del.icio.us (read all about del.icio.us here) or other link gathering tool to automatically post here. Why? They really are a different content type from blog posts. Some people may be interested in them, but many likely won't be. Inserting link content into blog posts muddies blog posts. For those that really do want to follow my links, you can get my feed from del.icio.us directly. When I finalize on the event/calendaring tools that I use, you can "watch" what I'm doing through a separate events feed. Point is, these are separate types of content than text blog posts, and should (need?) to be handled separately.

My use of links is...well, I don't know why I'm doing it. I have the vague sense that I should bookmark or note down stuff that is interesting, not important/relevant/timely enough to devote a whole blog post to, and a way to share those links with others. Richard described the "for:username" usage of del.icio.us -- feel free to send me stuff by adding the tag "for:borismann" to links you tag at del.icio.us.

I'm link farming the future, thinking that at some future time I may search my links or go back to them or...do something with them.