I was explaining to someone the other day about the old blogging dichotomy between “thinkers” and “linkers” and the value of both approaches. Personally, I guess I am sometimes one, sometimes the other, but there’s no doubt that linking is easier and it’s what I do by default when I don’t have a more substantial essay or interview or other original content to offer.

As it happens, I am working on an interview for this site, but in the meantime I can’t resist posting links to other people’s stuff when it’s relevant. I actually think that’s important because a site that doesn’t link out much sends a message that it expects its readers to find everything they need in one place, which is presumptuous to the point of hubris. That’s also ignorant about how the web works, in which just about everything of value is distributed across a network of contributors.

Over at Many-to-Many, Clay Shirky’s blogmate Ross Mayfield posts Many-to-Many: Tag This? about Feedster’s new “Tag This” feature:

Feedster is introducing a Tag This widget that blog authors can include in their posts for readers to anonymously tag posts. A volunteer manual way of building a database. After you enter a tag, you get to see the list of tags for the post, but they don’t link anywhere so the reward for the effort is unfulfilling. (Rafer notes: The tags submitted now are “real” and being databased, so give it a shot on your blog or mine. Just due to time constraints, the tags are only displayed once a new tag is submitted. All the tag data will be available via the expected and reasonable mechanisms shortly.) Blog search engines serve readers and with future iterations this hints at a good distributed way to engage them.

See Also: Bookmark This