LostFocus

Last night I’ve been discussing blogging¹ with Chris and after she looked around a bit over here she asked me: “Why would I be interested in a link blog?” And a link blog is basically what this page is – I link to stuff I like or find to be interesting without adding much of my own opinion, experiences or that illusive personal voice. And basically it has been that way since always.²

Besides being too lazy to write more than a paragraph or two, I do have another “excuse” for “just” link blogging: I really do like link blogs. I have been following waxy.org/links for years, I’m following a whole bunch of people who share their links on Google Reader³ and I even built myself a little script that takes all status updates of the people I follow on twitter, scans them for links and builds a little link feed out of it. And I do follow a lot of people who do link a lot.⁴ And I sure love givemesomethingtoread.com.

Now why would I want to do such a thing or follow those kinds of blogs? It’s easy: they curate the web for me.
There are many people out there who create really outstanding, wonderful, inspiring stuff⁵ – texts, books, drawings, photography, movies and so on. And there is no way I on my own could be able to find those things that clearly deserve an audience.⁶ And those link blogs and shared items and links on twitter help me find both the popular things⁷ and the hidden gems.

And my rather humble hope is that a few people might like my selection of things from the web, either when actually following the blog here or by having stuff rated up on one of those tools that use link counts to determine which pages are worth having a look at. That’s why I keep linking to stuff that I find and find to be interesting, documenting what was worthy of my attention and recommending you guys to check it out.

The fact that I do that on many different platforms, very inconsistently and with no real system behind which tool I use to share those – that’s a whole different blog post right there.

1. So, yeah, this is now going to be a blog-post about blogging. Very last decade, I know. I want to apologize for that in advance. [↩]
2. Of course, back in the old days, I had this category Mademoiselles which was rather popular. [↩]
3. Which is basically just link blogging for lazy people. [↩]
4. I’m not actually reading that feed, but it is an excellent Spark for my Fever installation. [↩]
5. Yeah, I prefer the word “stuff” over the word “content.” [↩]
6. And clearly deserve me as an audience. Ha. [↩]
7. Which usually, a week or two later, someone will be sending me as “funny” email or via IM [↩]