I’ve got a Link Blog, and Why You Should Care
Posted on July 7th, 2006by Michael Gray in SEO, Social Networks, Tools
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I’m sure some of you folks happened to stumble across this or maybe you’ve even gotten a trackback ping or two and seen my link blog and wondered what the heck I’m up to.
Link blogs aren’t new but as Greg Noted recently (see Greg Hartnett » Blog Archive » The Linkblog) lots and lots of people are doing it. The way most linkblogs work is they are tied to del.icio.us, and act as a backup more than anything else (see How to back up del.icio.us bookmarks on your blog - Lifehacker). I like to add a little extra functionality into mine I’m tagging all the books I read, movies I see, and CD’s I buy (yes Cal I still buy CD’s cause DRM sucks) . I may even start adding in some places I travel.
Allright so now that you’re bored to tears with my personal life you’re wondering when is he going to get to the ‘why should I care part’? Well my buddy nick did a much better job of explaining it in his post How to Mine Competitors and Readers for Links and you should go read it before going any further. Yes that means you … no really I mean it go read it and then come back …
Back with me? Good sometimes knowing what people are thinking about, reading and maybe doing is just as interesting as what they are blogging about. In fact in some cases you’ll see them bookmarking stuff weeks before they blog about it. Sometimes if people are busy they don’t get around to blogging about it. Now if I bookmark something uber top secret or uber spammy I mark it ‘do not share’ but 95% of the stuff I bookmark is free for everyone. In addition to watchign someone’s inbox you can add people to ‘your network’ so you get links everyone in your network in one place (kind of like the Yahoo 360 link concept) click to enlarge
Over on the right you’ll see everybody who’s in ‘my network’ (damn Bill you mark way more stuff than me!). If you click over to someone in your network you can also get into their BI business and look at who else they thought was important or interesting and add them to your network. Now if a few people in your networked bookmarked something it might be tip to something you wanted to check out.
Now of course there’s absolutely noting to prevent you from subscribing to someone’s network and not giving anything back and not sharing your bookmarks, but if you do I’ll tell you I’ll be very disappointed in you (insert virtual head shake and cold guilty stare here). I think this kind of behavior is something search engines really need to be concerned about. For example I think searching throught the bookmarks of people in my network for some topics would give me much better results than the search engines ever could, which is why I think the engines are looking at ways to leverage bookmarks into ranking algorithms.
So if you’ve got a delicious account and want to share the URL’s feel free to drop them below in the comments (obvious spammers will be deleted).
Related Information
- Greg Hartnett » Blog Archive » The Linkblog
- How to back up del.icio.us bookmarks on your blog - Lifehacker
- How to Mine Competitors and Readers for Links | Performancing.com
July 7th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
Gray I like your tag cloud for Del.icio.us links. What did you use to make it. Also, here is my del.icio.us url:
http://del.icio.us/darinkeir
July 7th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Incredibly well hidden on delicious
http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls
July 8th, 2006 at 11:58 am
I keep a tagroll on my personal website and update it from time to time. It eliminates most of the problems with that plagued the old links pages from back in the day, it’s better for seo, and the tag cloud gives visitors some sense of what to expect from the site.
July 8th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
That should have read “It eliminates most of the problems with link rot that plagued …” (Is there an edit function?)
July 15th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
I’ve been a subscriber of your delicious feed for more than 9 months now.
Some junk, but tons of good stuff!
September 25th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
I very much agree with this.
As I see things its all a mather of aspects and tagging.
With links, del.icio.us, digit and so on you tag the data for Google, Yahoo and so on. The search enginees obvious want to use the best and most correct tagging-source.
Different kind of communtities, not only link communitites, but also picture, video or expert communitties could be prime source of excellent tagging.
Obvious we can express different kind of aspects during tagging. Uploading your pictures to Flickr gives the Flickr community the oppurtinity to express the image aspect of your site.
A diving site could express the water sport aspects of your site. Maybe by linking to your article about a water sport contest.
Hence different kind of taggers would probably be trusted to tagg only certain type of data. The diving site would be trusted for water sport but maybe not about ham-radio.
Thanks for fun site.
Best Regards
Hans
March 17th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Great Post. Very helpfull informations. Thanks a lot. Jürgen from Germany.