In Defense Of Link Blogs

Jorn Barger over at Robot Wisdom gives his reasons why link blogs are valuble. He's roused to this by something very stupid that Warren Ellis said:

"...no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BoingBoing crew anyway"

And I'm never going to write a blues song as great as Hoochie Coochie Man (although I believe Vanilla Pudding Blues does give it a run for its money), so I guess I should stop trying that too.

Ellis goes on to say that there are already too many link blogs and that to add more seems wasteful. Why not just try generating content, he asks.

Well, I know that genuine content is hard between the work, the cricket and the blues as well as the drinking (let's not forget the drinking) making more than 4 or 5 posts a week is difficult for me. If some of those posts are pure link blogs then I'm not sorry for it. I doubt my tiny readership really come here for pictures of me and my band or my occasional rant anyway.

The original stated aim of this blog was to have somewhere to put links to all the stuff I was going to talk about down the pub later. Either so that everyone would be up to speed or they'd have one place to go to find out what the heck it was I was talking about.

I mean, I probably could just point them to Boing Boing or Robot Wisdom or Fark, but then they would have to pick through the things that didn't interest me, too.

As Jorn points out, we all have very different tastes. No one blog could, or should, be completely congruent with anybody's taste but the author. I like the above sites very much, but I don't always read an article just because Cory Doctorow has given it his blessing.