Via the Cliopatria blog I’ve been reading Laura McKenna’s thoughts on changes in blogging in The Blogosphere 2.0. On the whole I think blogging has changed for the better, but there was an observation on the lack of linking which I thought was fair.
In the past I used to compile posts which were lists of links of what I’d been reading. This meant opening and editing drafts each time I wanted to make a note, which was a pain. I moved to storing bookmarks on del.icio.us (now delicious.com). This collated links with minimal formatting and posted them on a daily basis if there were five or more links to post. It works, but it’s ugly. I moved to ma.gnolia which allowed more formatting. It also offered the promise of being able to theme collations, so that the past-based links came out in one post, the science links in another and so on. Sadly this option was never enabled, and things got worse when ma.gnolia suffered an existence faliure, along with its backups earlier this year. It’s made linking more of an effort again.
What I’ve been doing is posting to Friendfeed or Twitter, but that’s an imperfect solution for me. If I link from here then in small way I help boost the Page Rank of the entry I’m linking to. That effect doesn’t really happen with other methods. So I’ve put together a Heath Robinson mix of JavaScript, PHP and MySQL to streamline my linking. I can’t publish the scripts here, as they’re terribly insecure but I’ll describe what’s going on and if you know basic PHP you should be able to conjure up something similar.
I start with Google Reader. I don’t use the Blogroll. I’m fairly certain it’s not up-to-date as I add sites to my reader every two or three days. I have a subscribe button on my toolbar and if I see a site with an interesting post I subscribe to the RSS feed. Along with some search tools I use it means I can be collating a thousand links a day, though many of those are duplicates. It’s quite possible I’ll pick up a blog entry from the blog’s RSS feed, Maia Atlantides, IceRocket, Technorati and Wordpress’s tag search. That’s a lot to read and most of the entries are in the mass folder. I tend to scan these for headlines rather than read the summaries. If it’s a post I want to come back to I’ll ’star’ it.
Now, the starred entries I can open in my browser. On the toolbar of my browser I have an ‘autopost’ button. This grabs the title of the page and the URL and passes it to a form. In this form I fill out a brief description of what the link is and choose a category for it. This then stores the information in a MySQL database. I’ve also written a script which picks a category (currently just past, because that’s where most the links are). When it’s triggered it writes an email to Wordpress.com and then deletes the sent links from a category in the database. The post-by-email function at Wordpress.com strips the email of the formatting that I’d spent quite a while preparing, but it still posts the email contents into the Vidi category. I’ve set up a cron job which will trigger a flush of the ‘past’ category it at 19:00 each Friday. If I start getting long posts I can trigger it post any day it has more than ten links by changing a line in the crontab. I can then set up other checks to collate the Science links on Tuesdays and so on.
After all this it means if I see something I like I just click autopost, type a sentence or two, and leave the computer to sort out which post it appears in, when, with what and in which blog. But, apart from my creative laziness, do linking posts matter?
Clearly it does if I’m referring back to something. You can go back and check to see if I’ve misunderstood or misrepresented something. It’s effectively referencing in hypertext. But hypertext is machine readable and links take on other significance. Links are the currency of the web. Linking to something not only potentially sends visitors, it also improves search ranking. Or at least it does in the right place.
On the right I have a blog-roll which is usually out of date within a or two of updating it. If you’re not listed there it’s still perfectly possible I read your weblog via RSS, because RSS is what I use not that link list. Nor does anyone else. People have a blind spot when it comes to these links, so their main effect is to slow down the page load time. Few than one in ten-thousand visitors will click on one of those links. They also get ignored by Google. Instead if I want to say something is an interesting page I need to say it in body text like this, preferably with a brief reason why. That’s why I’d far rather produce posts which list links rather than have a blog-roll. It’s more valuable for the blogs I link to and eliminates a largely unused block of space. If it is a benefit I also think there’s an imperative that I link to sites I like, rather than sites which I think are just plain mad.
None of this is a comment on how other people blog. People blog for different reasons and want to do different things. There are some bloggers who will not link to this site as a matter of principle. There’s a variety of reasons for that but one is that they have corporate responsibilities which means that they ignore all other bloggers. Others are writing personal diaries for their own reflection rather than as part of a wider social exchange. Many more don’t know about this site and even if they do they may simply not like it and so not link here. I’m not bothered by that because people blog for different reasons and it’s diversity which makes blogging interesting. So I’m not expecting reciprocal links. In fact I’d be a bit disappointed it did happen because I’d far rather read why someone else thinks a link is interesting that read that they found it via here.
