One of the topics discussed at Dunstan’s (while tucking into the freshest and finest scrambled eggs) was that of blogmarks: their purpose, evolution and effectiveness.
Given that ‘traditional’ weblogging is characterised by posting links with brief commentary, the advent of blogmarks (AKA remaindered links, quick links, linklog) as a separate rolling list of links is responsible for, or responding to, a change a blogging style.
Many bloggers using blogmarks, myself included, have moved towards a more prosaic approach, writing longer articles and opinion pieces while relegating many links to a sidebar.
Some bloggers, notably Jason Kottke, place their blogmarks inline with each blog post, thus rendering the links more noticeable. Others, including Dunstan, allow comments on each blogmark, thereby creating a fully-blown blog within a blog. In fact Kottke’s remaindered links commentary seems to have gained a community of its own.
Tom Coates who, incidentally, has inline blogmarks also compiled in a sidebar but no per-link comments, recently posted in this subject. Tom reflects my own motives for posting blogmarks separately from blog posts:
[Firstly] while my weblog isn’t any longer ‘just’ for me, it’s definitely not just for an audience either. I use my weblog as a searchable archive – a repository of things that I’ve seen and read and that I thought were interesting, I use it to record thoughts that I think might be useful and that otherwise I’ll forget. I use it as a notepad, as a chronicle, as a place to store my photographs. There’s an interplay between trying to be fresh for other people and not really giving a damn about other people.
[...] Secondly I operate with an understanding of my links as a kind of microcontent vote. It’s the idea that by linking to something I say, “Yes – this deserves some of your attention – this is a good thing”, and that the more sites that do that the more attention something will get.
Tom also makes sense on the issue of not attributing blogmarks:
My weblog grew up online with ‘via’ links on weblogs. That was the way we did things. [...] As time has gone by, I’ve increasingly come to the opinion that links are everywhere and that referencing where you found the link alone is no longer quite as necessary or as useful as it once was. [Now] I look for commentary – something I can actually cite that had a useful contribution to make on those links concerned.
So blogmarks are primarily for me. Publishing them to the Web provides a central repository which others can browse should they so desire. Using my blog as the vehicle offers up an existing categorisation system and chronological archive for increased findability.
Do you keep a blogmarks linklog? Why/Why not? Should I ditch the ‘via’ links? Should I publish blogmarks inline with blog posts?
Keith wrote:
I do have them and I call ‘em “Quicklinks”, but they’re pretty much the same thing. As to why, it’s mostly to bookmark sites, articles and the like that I find interesting and to share those with other people.
As far as the “via” links – I don’t have them, but I don’t really see a strong argument for or against them. If you find it easy to maintain and want to give props to people for pointing you to something, keep them.
I will say I rarely click on via links and generally don’t pay attention to them.
I do occasionally add a “more” link which will point to a more in-depth post or commentary relating to my quicklink on another site. I’m still working out how best to display this though.
Now when it comes to inline blogmarks. I personally find it distracting. I can understand the idea behind doing that, but frankly I don’t like it.
sil wrote:
I keep the via links on mine because it doesn’t hurt to do so, and it takes no effort on my part (my bookmarklet grabs it from the referrer, and then I look up a name for that page server-side). Although, yes, things get linked all over the place, I’m firmly of the opinion that it is way, way better to have too many links than not enough. The web is a web, after all, rather than a serial ladder of links; although it won’t help any individual person much to know whence came your last interesting link, it contributes overall to the heavily cross-referenced nature of the web. Naturally, all these high-falutin’ ideas wouldn’t apply if I had to do any work to add via links, but since I don’t, I like ‘em.
s t e f wrote:
I would tend to create a blog entry for every link I want to post, for two reasons:
One is that my CMS tool requires some tweaking before making a proper blogmark such as yours – this is, then, not a real issue, if you will… yet many people don’t always do what they want with their CMS and that may change the conditions under which they post links. So my point is perhaps relevant after all… ;)
Two: More importantly I like the idea of being able to comment on a link. I mean, at the moment you put a link to this-or-that site, but in six months, how are you going to remember it? And blogging each link with its own entry makes it easier to have proper comments, thus enriching the intrinsic value of the link. (again my site is not a good example but since it will undergo a mutation soon I feel free to pretend I’m already allowing comments on blog entries…)
kristine wrote:
The nice thing to me about blogging links I find is that they now have a date context to them. So I can have them categorized in structures like my tradition browser bookmarks, but I can also look through all of the bookmarks that I’ve made during the last week or whatever. I have a link log ( lovelinks ) and then I display some of the more interesting links inline between my journal entries ( kadyellebee ) It works well for me. :)