Bill Drew posted a mini-rant on his blog yesterday titled "Blog posts with no content". In this short post he complained about those who create blog posts that had no narrative but that "contain only links to things they added in del.icio.us." His reasoning: "If it is important enough for you to post a link in your blog, then write a full post about the topic."
Sorry Bill, but as someone who does the thing you’re complaining about (sort of) I respectively disagree. To explain the "sort of" I don’t post my del.icio.us links as a blog post but if you subscribe to my blog’s feed you will get one item per day that contains the items I bookmarked that day. Since most people read my blog as a feed, I believe this would count to Bill.
I post my bookmarks because people might be interested in what I’m currently researching, preparing for, or just looking into. On a day in which I have six new links to the Kindle, this would imply that I’m thinking about it. Recently I’ve been adding bookmarks for Web site dealing with Creative Commons. Not because I have something particular to say about it right now, but because I’ll be presenting a full-session on the topic at CIL2008. Maybe I’m bookmarking sites in preparation for a blog post in the next few days.
In any case, I like seeing people’s new bookmarks without having to get yet another feed from del.icio.us. It’s something they’re doing and so I like all that info in one place. Ultimately, I find a lot of cool new resources from such posts so it’s worth my time to at least glance at them.
Now, as for reposting tweets on your blog, that’s the one that bugs me. Mainly because if I read your blog chances are you’re a Twitter friend too and I don’t need to see those posts twice. More importantly a day full of Twitter posts as a blog post completely takes them out of context of the conversation at the time making them mostly unintelligible.
