Dear Nathan and other automated ‘links-for-today’- bloggers,
I stopped using del.icio.us because it took too much time from me to keep adding things in the archive. It’s something I had to give up because I lack the time to individually tag and save everything I read. I didn’t and will not delete my del.icio.us profile because some people actually link to items in it, and I didn’t want to cause holes in their knowledge base.
I read too much to actually take the time to log in on del.icio.us over and over again, also because my browser is self-cleaning every cache and temp folder on closure and I refuse to have my passwords automatically saved.
What also bothers me on del.icio.us is that it automatically returns to the page you just indexed, while most of the time those articles are somewhere in a tree or summary. I then have to hit the back button at least three times (meanwhile waiting for del.icio.us to load again, only to skip it) to return to that tree or summary and continue browsing.
Instead, I just write about the items I really want to post and add something personal to them like an image or some text or thoughts, and plainly link in html to the other articles that I’ve read, but don’t write about. Not that the content behind those links is unworthy, but more because I lack time to write about them, or because so (too) many others already have written about that particular topic (and sometimes have formulated it better than I ever could have).
I use the posted links as a personal archive. Typing in keywords in my customized blog search returns those links too, so why bother? I’m not a pro-blogger and I havn’t got enough time to write quality posts about everything I read or think about. Linking up what you don’t blog isn’t something to be ashamed of, but could be seen as a service towards your readers. – However, it does drive traffic away from your blog. And that’s something you’ll see in your stats and click-through rate, I guess. Perhaps that’s why Philipp never posts links on Google Blogoscoped?
It’s nice of you to share your entire del.icio.us with the rest of the world, but to be fair, I really skip those posts. It’s too many text and links in too little space. Also the list of tags is a bit ‘trop’. Let’s not forget they’re all links too, which often makes it a pretty colourful posting and somewhat confusing. You also don’t have an ‘open link in new browser window/tab’ set up, so going back takes a few clicks and mostly some time, which is very frustrating because time is the only thing I can’t buy and I’m always running out of it.
Most of the time, the story somebody links too also has links in it that matter to that particular story, so in fact as I’m browsing I’m surfing some clicks and some loading time away from your blog. Eventually, I must say I rarely get to click more than two links in a post of 10+ links.
I must admit I’ve been listing up a lot of links myself too lately, but as stated before I do this because I want to centralize my online knowledge archive, and most of my online time is spent on my own blog or the ones I link to in my blogroll. Displacing that knowledge to something like del.icio.us seemed rather unlogical to me, because then I’d have to do research in more than one location which again takes away time. I’m not against social bookmarking, but I see some people have a del.icio.us and furl and whatever other account with the same links in every account. I can only imagine they must have too much time on their hands.
I’d rather post five times a day and link to ten other posts than have a 24-links long list to work through. But that’s just my two cents. I realized I did fine without del.icio.us before it started, I couldn’t miss it while I was at it and it became addictive and seemed very necessary, but the longer I’m off it, the less I regret having dropped out. Now I can read much more. Call me an anti-social linker, but I don’t see the need to keep it up for me personally.
This post was written in reply to Nathan’s ‘I have a problem but it’s del.icio.us‘