{"id":1832,"date":"2014-11-17T07:10:51","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T13:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=1832"},"modified":"2014-11-03T09:19:16","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T15:19:16","slug":"lessons-from-curating-a-link-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1832","title":{"rendered":"Lessons from curating a link blog"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure style=\"width: 240px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"3D Strongest Link by StockMonkeys.com\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/8253443979_c7a0da8957_m_link.jpg\" alt=\"link photo\" width=\"240\" height=\"160\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"><small>Photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/86530412@N02\/8253443979\" target=\"_blank\">StockMonkeys.com<\/a> <a title=\"Attribution License\" href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-inject\/images\/cc.png\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I maintain a link blog about <a href=\"http:\/\/coloradocsas.tumblr.com\/\">Colorado food and local food in general<\/a>.\u00a0 I use Tumblr, but I&#8217;m only incidentally interested in Tumblr traffic.\u00a0 Tumblr hooks up to Facebook and Twitter, and pushes links there.\u00a0 (I realize that I am missing interaction on Twitter and Facebook by using these networks as broadcast only, but I don&#8217;t have time to fully engage, so I thought a limited presence was better than nothing.)<\/p>\n<p>Having maintained this link blog for over two years, I have learned a few things.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It is easy to start a project like this, but hard to finish.\u00a0 There&#8217;s always more to do.\u00a0 I think I&#8217;ll stop when it stops being interesting.<\/li>\n<li>Deciding to do this is a great way to gain a broad understanding of a field while providing some value (via curating).\u00a0 As you find more and more sources of links, videos, articles and audio content, you&#8217;ll gain a sense of what is happening.\u00a0 Even if you don&#8217;t painstakingly read every article, you&#8217;ll still get a sense.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of sources, Google alerts is your friend.\u00a0 I get emailed alerts on a variety of searches, and about 25% of the results are worth posting.\u00a0 Facebook and twitter are additional great sources of links.<\/li>\n<li>An RSS reader can help you if you are really diving in.<\/li>\n<li>Giving someone notice that you&#8217;ve referenced their article via an &#8216;@&#8217; mention will get you their attention.<\/li>\n<li>Queuing up posts on Tumblr is a life saver.\u00a0 This lets you stack up posts and portion them out one per day.\u00a0 I typically have between 15 and 30 posts in my queue.\u00a0 This makes timely posts more difficult, but frees me up to forget about the link blog for weeks at a time.<\/li>\n<li>A link blog like this is a great use of your in between time, especially if you have a smartphone.\u00a0 In five minutes I can scan and post two or three links, where five minutes is barely enough time to think of a regular blog post.\u00a0 The Tumblr app is very good.<\/li>\n<li>A linkblog is a great resource for other content generation.\u00a0 I have a newsletter about local food as well, and a key section of that is interesting links.\u00a0 Those are almost entirely drawn from the Tumblr.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The linkblog approach is very similar to Twitter, but differs in a few crucial ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the permanence of the link repository (Twitter <a href=\"https:\/\/support.twitter.com\/articles\/277671-i-m-missing-tweets\">only stores your last 3200 tweets<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>less interaction, unless you login to each social network<\/li>\n<li>the ability to post richer media<\/li>\n<li>you own the content (and can <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tumblr.com\/docs\/en\/custom_domains\">host it on your domain<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>ability to queue up content (without paying)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These attributes make a linkblog a fine complement to Twitter.<\/p>\n<p>There are some problems with this model, however.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Limited interaction with followers, either on Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve found that engaging on Twitter and Facebook directly is far more effective if you want content to be viewed or links to be clicked.<\/li>\n<li>A linkblog like this is not truly building <a href=\"http:\/\/sethgodin.typepad.com\/seths_blog\/2013\/09\/qa-tribes-and-the-reality-of-worldview.html\">my tribe<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, if you have limited time, want to gain insight into a particular area of interest, and are OK with the drawbacks, create a linkblog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I maintain a link blog about Colorado food and local food in general.\u00a0 I use Tumblr, but I&#8217;m only incidentally interested in Tumblr traffic.\u00a0 Tumblr hooks up to Facebook and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content","category-useful-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1837,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions\/1837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}