Why A Link Is Not Enough

I know some of you are more interested in my recent Trio highlights than others, and that those others have been counting down the days until I do a proper blog post where I amusingly contemplate my navel and/or contemplate the amusing navels of other blogs through extensive linking.

The latter post topic has always seemed to me to be an interesting conundrum, which was highlighted succinctly by Ernie several weeks ago.

Ernie, AKA LittleYellowDifferent, was (is?) a major-league A-list blogger who celebrated his seventh-year anniversary of blogging a scant month before my own. As a birthday gift to his readers, he reinstated hundreds of old posts that had been long-since gone from his page.

Commenting on his great post reinstatement, he made the following observation:

…although a couple hundred of those posts are left unpublished since they’re links to dead websites. … Like all bloggers that started in the early 2000’s, content centered around link commentary, rather than having your blog be a personal soapbox.

I never really fit in with the bloggers Ernie mentions because I’ve always been more parts soapbox and/or megaphone than links, and his post crystallizes the reason why.

Links aren’t life. When you spend all your time blogging about the hottest video or the latest tech news your blog stops being about your life and starts being about everyone else’s. Seven years down the line those links are dead, and you’re left skimming off a seventh of your posts that are now meaningless.

That’s why you’ve spent three days listening to the ancient best of Trio. Trust me, I have plenty of interesting links – enough links in the past five days that I could dole them out one per day and almost make it to Thanksgiving. But, looking back there wouldn’t be any blog there – no life or music – just other peoples songs, lives, and blogs.

And, if you aren’t interested in my songs, life, and music, I’ll still share some of the links with you every week or so.

(Now if only Ernie would reinstate the archives from SurvivorBlog and PuppetMaster. a-hem)