Linkblogging = Pointing at Awesome

So you’ve found something awesome on the internet. Maybe it’s a comic or a LOLcat or an article that completely supports your side of a recent argument about the economic foundations of Prussia. Great. How are you going to tell people about it?

You’ve got a lot of options in the current digital environment. You could email your friends, you can put it on your Facebook (under sharing Links, it’s on the lefthand side of the page), or you can make a linkblog and share it with the world.

Linkblogs are a bit different than regular blogs. While a blog can be a platform for you to write and express yourself, a linkblog is more like a pointer to cool stuff you didn’t make. The benefits of this kind of thing should be easy to see: it isn’t as hard to point people at something cool as it is to create something cool yourself. Remember our post about RSS readers, and how we called them news aggregators? Well, a linkblog is kind of like an attention aggregator. You’re pointing out things you think someone else should pay attention to. The more people who do it, the more will be infected with whichever your favourite meme is.

Some of the best blogs out there like BoingBoing are essentially linkblogs. The team behind the blog reads a whole lot of stuff and shares the most interesting with everyone else. BoingBoing usually adds a bit of commentary, but if you trawl through Tumblr you’ll find loads of tumblelogs (another word for linkblog) where people just post a link to cool stuff. The other thing about a good linkblog is how many people create theirs on a theme. This means you can use them as inspiration or research. Here’s one curated by a UBC student group about information and technology (disclosure statement: I’m the person responsible for that one). If you’ve got a favourite topic, finding someone who posts lots of links to stuff on the topic can be amazing. Or if you get inspired by art, find someone who posts links to loads of images (I like liquidnight, myself)

But what about you? You want some way to create your own linkblog? To share the cool stuff you’re finding on the internet, we’ll get you set up with a Tumblr account. We’re using Tumblr because it’s the most popular of the Tumblelog platforms.

NetworkEducation

1. First, head over to Tumblr.com and click on the “Sign Up” button in the top right of the screen to create an account. That’s done in exactly the way you’d expect if you’ve ever signed up for an account of any type before. You’ll be picking a tumblelog name as well as what the url will be.



2. Now head to Goodies and drag that grey “Share on Tumblr” Bookmarklet up to your webbrowser’s toolbar. You want it somewhere easily accessible, not buried in a menu. The idea here is to share lots of information so the fewer clicks between you and doing it, the better. (You’ll also notice there are a bunch of apps for using Tumblr on your smartphone – one of the great things about this form of microblogging is that since you aren’t adding much commentary it can be pretty close to one button sharing from your phone.)
3. Whenever you’re on an interesting website like this BoingBoing post (which is also a link to another post) just click that “Share on Tumblr” bookmark.



4. A window will pop up (assuming you have Javascript enabled in your browser) and you’ll be able to tell it what kind of material you’ve got there, be it a video, an audio file or if you just want a link to the URL. If you click the “Advanced” tab at the bottom you can add some tags or schedule your post to show up sometime in the future if you wish. Hit the “Create Post” button and you’re done.
5. In Tumblr when you created your account you selected your blog username. if you head to http://yourblogname.tumblr.com you can see what you shared. You can change how your Tumblr looks by clicking the “Customize” button on your Tumblr dashboard.

And there you go. Now you’re off sharing links to the world.

Linkblogging’s Significance

Now, it’s possible to say there’s not a lot of difference between setting up a Tumblr like this and just hitting the Share on Facebook link that shows up on so many websites. The main reason I’d suggest going these couple of extra steps is the control it gives you over your information. You have options for how to present the stuff you’re reading when you are using a tool like Tumblr. Facebook links and likes are just shared within Facebook and aren’t as organizable as a linkblog. There’s also a whole interesting pile of people posting interesting links to follow on Tumblr, making it a better place for research/inspiration.

If you combine this linkblogging technique (pointing at interesting/useful stuff you think people would like to read) with judicious tagging it can also work as a good archive of the stuff you’ve been reading, so you don’t misplace that article you read online that would be perfect for an essay you’ve got coming up. That’s so useful, in fact, we’re going to have a whole separate post on NetworkEd UBC about social bookmarking.

Long story short, if you’re reading/contributing to a linkblog, then you’re doing more than just pointing at awesome; the new context you’re participating in creating is being awesome itself.

For now, happy linking.