July 19th, 2006
No Matter How Late You Are, Don’t Screw Yourself
When I wrote yesterday’s post suggesting the use of two forms of linkblogging (speedlinking-linkblog-style and semi-linkblog-style) when you’re “late to the party” (i.e. late at blogging on breaking news), I couldn’t have predicted that Darren Rowse would promote a post by Tony Lawrence on how you could screw yourself by linkblogging poorly onto ProBlogger’s front page.
Expected or not, however, it reminds me that I wrote nothing on poor linkblogging habits yesterday – something I hope to resolve today.
Poor linkblogging habits, a.k.a. the empty linking habit, when sustained over a long period of time, often leads to blogs turning into sploggish monsters that attract few linkers (if any), which in turn, ensure that they either start rolling downhill, or remain on the mediocre side eternally. This leads to poor blogger morale, and perhaps even the dreaded phrase(s): “Blogging Sucks. I Quit.” Yes, multiple generalisations here, but you get my point.
But first, what does poor linkblogging mean? Basically, it means linking “…without (providing) additional value.” Even for speedlinking-linkblog-style posts (such as this one), where links are often accompanied by just one-liner descriptions and personal opinions, there is still value-added when you provide your take on the issue. But strip your own spin away from this sort of posts and you plunge into the empty linking habit. Of course, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t done it myself, though sometimes exceptions must be made if you really must…
This leads to my next point. Try not to be late too often. But if you are, sometimes you might just want to abandon the whole juicy fat piece of “breaking news” altogether, rather than try to keep up by linkblogging (even if you do it the right way). Your blog won’t die if you don’t post about AdSense’s latest ad format occasionally. I like to think that you could use a ratio to determine whether you should linkblog or not. Let’s put it at one linkblog-style post for every two solid, meaty, original posts of your own since many prominent bloggers, including Steve Rubel, seem to be serving their audiences well with such a ratio.
So, that should be it (for now). Hopefully, I’ve covered both sides of the linkblogging spectrum – at least with respect to being late to our blogosphere’s oh-so-frequent “parties”.
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3 Comments
July 19th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Thank you for your considerations . For me blogging has become an integral part of my online existence – when I wake up in the morning one of the first questions (after a good cup of Italian coffee) is what news and information will be out there to blog on. Maybe there is too much attention on breaking news and not enough on sharing information and confronting points of view.
I follow about 100 feeds nowadays. I deleted a number of them in time. The ones that I zapped were offering “old hat news”
If blogging is really like a conversation, conversations are networking amongst people who have the same view and perspective on things – the discussion will be on things that are important to them.
So in principle I believe blogs will aggregate people and draw more users only if the conversation is the right one: If you don’t find it entertaining, interesting, and useful you’ll move on – at least I do …
Sante
July 20th, 2006 at 11:33 am
True. In your context, poor linkblogging habits would then be a means of (easily) creating “wrong” or rather not-right conversation – and worse still, the blogger often knows that to be the case.
July 28th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
[...] But for this blog (and perhaps a couple of others), I find myself facing a completely different scenario. Some posts take up to two hours to write, while others of similar length take less than a third of that time. I’m not talking about linkblogging – done correctly or otherwise. [...]
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