This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: How not to be a link blogger Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

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.