This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Janek Schwarz. Original Post: What Makes Link Blogs So Successful Feed Title: The Wannabe Java Rockstar Feed URL: http://weblog.janek.org/Archive/Categories/javablogs.rss.xml Feed Description: The Wannabe Java Rockstar: Janek's weblog where all posts go to Eleven Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Janek Schwarz Latest Posts From The Wannabe Java Rockstar

Do you wonder why link blogs, such as Erik's or Scott's, are so successful? Conventional wisdom says, you'll get readers if you have good content. To some extend, it's true. I.e., my posts about Adobe Reader's deficiencies and InstallAnywhere's bugs had a lot of readers. Still, compared to Erik's or Scott's  blogs my blog enjoys only a minor readership.

Scoble has a theory why: link blogs want people to go somewhere else. Craig's List, Gizmodo, Engadget -- they all tell people to get lost. The philosophy of  those sites is to take us to the coolest stuff on the Internet. And by doing that, they have become the coolest places on the Internet.

Case in point, the posts where I pointed to somebody else had more readers than some of my original content.

Does this mean, I should turn this blog into a link blog? No, I like my little niche. I already got job offers via the blog. That's more than I had imagined when I started this thing. Plus, there can only be one Erik, Scott or Scoble, although I actually planned to do something similar to Scott's blog. He beat me by a couple of days.