Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

A disappointed (occasional) reader…

A disappointed (occasional) reader writes:

While an infrequent visitor to blogs, I think I’ve gone completely off your now.

why is it mostly just a set of links?

I don’t care what you’re reading as much as what you’re thinking. Help me understand the rationale. All I think when I look at the never-ending lists is that you don’t have time for work or anything else…..

A disappointed (occasional) reader-

Well, in short, it’s an experiment. I have an archive of 1000+ old bookmarks that I rarely revisit but am glad to have, and I daily stumble across a bunch of other links which I have some vague, persistent interest. So I’ve started posting them to del.icio.us which quickly archives them for me in a manner that I can access from the half-a-dozen browsers I use daily[1] without suffering “oh hell what was that link again damn I was using a browser at home” fever.

Tags, search, sharing; the whole panoply of social networking stuff.

And then del.icio.us posts a daily summary of my links back to my blog, so that other people can see what I am browsing or archiving, and moreover it gives me a copy of the information under my control; plus the act of posting to my blog sends pingbacks to the (occasional) blogs to which I link, which is useful.

I am still musing over the whole concept; I am experimenting with the “do not share” button on del.icio.us but it’s frankly a hassle; plus some other people seem to be reveling in the links I find, and posting comments to them. Also, personally I remember the term “blog” coming from “weblog” – being exactly that, a “web log”, ie: originally a log of interesting things found on the web.

So it’s an experiment. It’s likely here to stay. I will just have to strive to make it more interesting to the occasional reader, perhaps through greater personal annotation of the links I find rather than highlighting a sample extract.

—
[1] 2x Mac Safari, 1x Mac Firefox, 3x Solaris Nevada Firefox [coyote, sunray, thinkpad], 1x Nokia N800

⊞

Comments

11 responses to “A disappointed (occasional) reader…”

  1. benr

    I hate comments like that. Why do people think they have the right to complain about a blog? Just don’t read it, thats my opinion anyway.

    Alec, keep doing what your doing! 🙂

    Reply
  2. alecm

    Hi Ben!

    I subscribe to the theory that this is my space, and I do what I like here; that’s not to say that I won’t respect comments from readers and friends… but then it’s not to say that I will, either.

    I reckon freedom of speech goes both ways – you should take crit as well as give it; it’s just that here *I* get the veto. 🙂

    Reply
  3. Ian Smith

    I subscribe to a few people’s links via RSS – perhaps an RSS link to your del.icio.us feed would be an alternative to the posting feature. Not that I’m protesting about it – I just unsubscribed from del.icio.us when your links started appearing in your blog.

    I think that the links are a valuable part of your commentary because you comment on them rather than just posting them. I quite often visit them, and/or bookmark them myself.

    Reply
  4. Wayne Horkan

    Hi Alec,

    Although I sympathise, especially as a fellow ‘blog writer it appears one has to produce a very regular cadence to ensure continued, and growing, readership, I have to agree with your reader, mentioned above.

    The fashion for producing a blog post which is simply titled “Links for DD-MM-YYYY” and contains nothing but links is becoming ubiquitous – and even sadder is in full sway across blogs.sun.com.

    Like anyone I like to see interesting sites and links, however I go to blogs to read blogs, to gather opinion, see what peeps are chatting about, etc., etc., not to checkout someone else’s bookmarks.

    I believe that one has to think very hard about what blog postings are for, and if indeed “Links for DD-MM-YYYY” type postings are an adequate and appropriate mechanism for sharing bookmarks with one’s readers.

    Personally I feel that links, and bookmarks, are acceptable if introduced to the readers during a posting (or even as reference at the end of a posting), for me there has to be some posting ‘meat’ to go with my ‘link’ vegetables (terrible analogy, but it won’t be the worst thing you’ve forgiven me of).

    However I suspect that whilst the “Links for DD-MM-YYYY” helps to produce a regular cadence, and continued readership, it will sustain it’s use as a blog posting across the blogosphere.

    And for the record I really like your blog, as you can probably guess from the number of comments I keep leaving.

    All the best, Happy New Year, etc.,

    Wayne

    Reply
  5. Stephen Usher

    I must admit that I’m in two minds about the auto bookmark listing idea.

    Some of the links have been very useful and others have raised interesting questions which I’ve commented upon.

    Having said that, however, it does seem to break up the flow of your own postings and makes them stand out less. (It also makes the friends page on LJ harder to read as I have your alecrss user as a friend on there.)

    Just a thought, can dropsafe cope with a second set of entries? I’m thinking along the lines of Macrumors.com’s “Page 2” in which out of band messages can be posted. Then there would be the best of both worlds.

    Reply
  6. Wayne Horkan

    Hi again Alec,

    Just responded to this post on my blog at bsc.

    http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/links_for_dd_mm_yyyy

    Wayne

    Reply
  7. Ben K

    Keep it up, Alec. I like the ‘links for yyyy-mm-dd’ posts because they point to interesting things that I often wouldn’t have seen through any other form. I’m sure that if you had to write a full post for each and every link, we’d get to see less than 10% of those links.

    Thanks!

    Reply
  8. Carolyn

    Clearly, I liked at least one of your links (re 1/3/08) but I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t already read the article. Wayne has a point (I think others made, too) about the added commentary regarding the link. The link by itself without it isn’t going to entirely motivate me to go there.

    I also appreciate your comments about multiple browsers and using del.icio.us for bookmarks. That is an extremely helpful hint for me.

    And since Wayne (and some others at Sun) give the “choose font size” option, I realize it is not true on your site, but that can make a difference to whether or not I read something. Obviously, it doesn’t always make a difference.

    I second Ben K. Keep it up.

    Reply
  9. Neil

    I have to agree with those that don’t like it. While I sometimes find some value in the links if I manage to read through them all, I generally find them too dense (it’s not a single subject discussion), there is only a limited preview of what is being discussed, and it is far more frequent than your normal posting. And the whole structure, subject, etc just puts me off reading them.

    Is there anyway you could have an RSS feed that specifically excluded the link posts. And if using tags to achieve this, preferably a simple way to achieve that rather than having to include all the tags that are not links.

    Reply
  10. Neil

    Have you changed things slightly? It seems like the links used to be followed by a short section from the link, now it is a short summary by yourself (I assume). Or was I just misunderstanding before and your latest summaries have made more sense to me.

    I am still not 100% keen on them and could see advantages to subscribing separately to those posts, but at least I can see a bit more value in them.

    Reply
  11. alecm

    >Have you changed things slightly? It seems like the links used to be followed by a short section from the link, now it is a short summary by yourself (I assume).

    Exactly so. What appears after the link is elective, and I am playing with it.

    I am considering setting up the links as a separate blog-user so that people who want the “real” me can subscribe to my personal feed, but otherwise keep the intermingled heap of everything which is the main feed…

    Reply

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