OPEN

Image: Penny jar by Kevin (CC)

The high priest of my social world, Euan Semple, puts his finger on a something that’s been bugging me for a while…

concern that too many blogs “just” pointed to stuff. I am not so sure that this is a problem and sort of rests on the, mistaken in my view, assumption that blogging has to be like journalism.

One of the original uses of blogs was to point to stuff and to add comment about why it was interesting enough to point to. A lot of the benefit I get from the bloggers in my aggregator is their ability to find and point to good stuff related to my interests and concerns. Yes there is also great original content in there but even if all they did was point to stuff I would still get value from subscribing to them.

Struggling, as I am to get my blogging mojo back, I couldn’t agree more. And in part, a (false) fear of just pointing was part of the whole block…

In the comments, Lee Bryant, who I have annointed King of Analogy (see his Reboot 10 battery humans presentation for further evidence of his analogy liege-ability) in my mindscape, says:

Yes, pointing (signals) is very important. It’s like saving your copper coins – easy to do and adds up to something valuable over the long term.

From the Google-eye view of the network links, if they are put down by a person who finds something useful, are “signals of quality”, small signposts that help make sense of the trillion page cloud of information that is the web. From a personal networks point of view it is exactly the same.

It’s making me think I may add my delicious link stream to my main feed after all. Most of them are things I would blog about if I had enough time. Or – when the new WordPress blog finally comes online – running a parallel / Tumblr feed…

Maybe.