links for 2006-03-21 March 20, 2006
Daily Link Postings, Revisited
Mike Sansone, over at Converstations has written a piece “Finding Value w/ Daily Links”, and was kind enough to include myself as one of the folks whose daily link postings he found value in. Well, first – “thanks!”. But I thought I’d expand on the “why” behind the daily link postings (or the not-so-daily link postings as they tend to be).
Mike’s opening observation is:
When I first began blogging, I thought daily links were a lazy way to publish a post. It almost stopped me from subscribing to some feeds. When I show these posts to others, their initial reaction is similar.
I know exactly what you mean. If I’m subscribing to a feed, and all it turns out to be is a series of link postings, it’s unlikely to stay in my feed list for long. There are plenty of places I’ll get information like that already – digg, Newsvine, Slashdot, etc.
Mike closes his piece with this:
By sharing what you’re reading - sharing your knowledge - your customers become smarter, and you’re all on the same page.
That’s a fair part of why I do the link posts, when I do them – there are some folks reading my site that I specifically want to see what I’m working through, web wise. But there’s more to it than that.
Back in January, I wrote “On Daily Link Postings” and addressed the reasons I was doing the daily link posting thing then. This was in response to Bren, of Slacker Manager, stopping the publishing of his daily links. I’ve thought about it a little more since then, and thought I’d expand on the nature of the daily link post, as it relates to me.
- To show the blog is “alive” – if I get caught up in my “day” job, I may not get around to writing a “real” post on the blog for a few days. I don’t want to re-blog, and post snippets of news or whatever that are going to be seen in a multitude of other places, so a post with a few links that I came across that day “keeps the blog ticking over”.
- That said, it may be that the reason I’m busy is I’m researching something or other – and that typically leads to a number of pages and links on the same or similar topics. That may be useful to others, but will also serve as a reference point for me.
- As a part of my daily GTD process, I look at the blog during my morning review, making sure it’s up and seeing if there’s any comments that I should respond to. Daily link posts only publish if I marked items through to del.icio.us the day before, so it’s the top of the page if there is one – sometimes, I may mark a number of items during the day, and not actually get to look at them as closely as I might want to. The link post the next day reminds me of that fact – and indeed, I use a del.icio.us tag of “@ToCheck” specifically for things like this.
- As I noted in my January post, having the daily links come in to my RSS aggregator, and then be indexed by my desktop tool, provides me quick access AND a backup of these links, should del.icio.us be down.
I want to be a creator of content, rather than a republisher, and it’s my aim to keep the daily link posts in the minority on this site; at one point, when I was setting them up, I was tempted to have them post to a category that I then didn’t have displayed on the front-page of the website. But that ties us back to Mike’s final observation, that sharing your reading (much as I do with my 2006 Reading page is a good thing, and lets folks know “where you’re at “.
(edited: fixed a couple of the links)