Week End; Recommend
There’s quite the discussion about link-style posts such as these on blogs these days. I don’t have a whole lot to contribute other than the fact that my blog is focused on and around things that interest me. If, like this style of post, are links that I am currently digging or find interesting, I don’t have a problem sharing them. I’ve seen arguments about longevity and posts such as these how they don’t get the traffic over the long haul or bring crazy amounts of search results but that’s not necessarily what my personal blog is for. Sure, having more visitors is nice, but it wouldn’t be that hard to ramp up traffic by just writing about a few specific topics to garner it. The problem is, is that at that point I’ve flipped the script and write/post for you (or whatever audience I’m chasing) instead of me, no thanks.
Chris has moved his link sharing to Twitter and other social media outlets which is great. I have no way of knowing this for sure, but my gut feeling is that my Twitter audience and my audience here aren’t quite the same. When I share links on Twitter that I don’t share here, often times it’s because I feel they’re poignant for that audience. Inversely, there are links I see on Twitter that I’m not sure my audience here has been exposed to yet; I like having the ability to craft and share those and support with context or application as needed.
I’ve got some 500+ posts worth history here and much of the old stuff doesn’t get touched. I’m okay with that. By writing/posting stuff that I’m currently into, it’s created – if nothing else – a place where I can go back and see where I was at certain periods of time; yes, even the link posts. It helps me to see how my interests have changed and hopefully how I’ve grown over time; to me, that’s much more important than some long-tail search traffic.
In short, do what you feel works best for you and your goals. I love the fact that we’ve all got tools to self-publish and we all utilize them differently. If all of us were Gruber’s then there’d be no fresh content to share. If all of us were long-form writers and there were no Kottke’s or Gruber’s, I’m guessing we’d all have a very limited exposure to what everyone else is doing or writing.
With that, let’s do some Interneting… (more…)