Link Blogs

One of the many blog genres is the link blog, a site that just provides links to other sites. It sounds boring, but some of the blogosphere’s most popular sites are link blogs: Jason Kottke adds little content at kottke.org; nor do the boing boingers.

Without realizing what I was doing, I started a link blog in July of 2007. I put up a “snacks” feature on OWF, a light feature that would just point people to interesting items on the Web. I made it easy to maintain, and I started populating it.

I’ve come to realize just how addictive such a feature is. Its main purpose is still to provide links that my readers may or may not find interesting, links that may fuel a coffee break at work. But I often find myself “snacking” a link that I want to be able to retrieve at some later point. Blogger makes this even more compelling: I host the main snack blog on blogspot, and the default Blogger header has a search box for the entire site. And once Jack prompted me to add descriptions to my links (which show up in the RSS feed but not yet on OWF), I realized I could add keywords that would speed up the retrieval.

So have I read The Mathematics Of Change Ringing [pdf] yet? Well, not completely. But I can revisit it at some later point without trying to remember where I saw the link. To find the link just now, I went to the main snack page, typed the word “bell” into the navbar at the top of the screen, and went right to the entry.

It’s been liberating in an odd way. I can tuck links into this little corner of the Internet and recover them at will. It’s become a Pensieve of sorts. I can snack a link, close the window, and revisit it when I have time.