Frank has a good point about the ways that different sorts of links effect different modes of social connection online. There’s the inline link, where I observe (for instance) that Frank said something interesting tonight about links. There’s the blogroll link, where one can tell that I keep Frank on my list of people-to-visit, with the snazzy recently-updated feature from Jason at Blogrolling. But lots of people (I included) rely to a great extent on news aggregators that scoop up the RSS or RDF files from target sites without actually making a detectable link on their blogs.
For instance, I subscribe to Phil Wolff’s RSS feed, but he’s not on my blogroll (not deliberately, I think; as I recall, A Klog Apart seemed to be on hiatus when I moved over from my Seabury address to Cornerhost). But no-one would know that I read Phil unless I made it explicit here. The link is there in my aggregator behavior, but not in my textual presence. I wouldn’t want to overdramatize that difference, but it does disrupt the generosity of the Web that David describes. Frank says he’ll want to talk about that in the BloggerCon session with Jon Udell (I read his RSS feed, too, and sometimes I pretend I understand it) — someone take notes, because I’ll be talking about Spirituality in that time slot. . . .
Posted by AKMA at September 29, 2003 10:54 PM | TrackBackOne of my chief regrets about BloggerCon (it hasn't happened yet and - yes - already I have regrets) is the fact that there is so much jammed into so little time. If I want to attend the Technology panel, I'll have to miss Halley's case study and the BOF (birds of a feather) session. I won't miss Med blogging at all, but someone will miss it at that time I'm sure.
If I do Udell on Aggregators, I'll miss Phil Wolff on enterprise blogging and AKMA on spirituality. I won't miss the Presidential Politics part much, but that's competing in the same time slot!
In the afternoon I pick Audioblogging for adding to my tool set, but I want to attend Joi Ito's Community session, and I'm interested in what Volokh has to say and I NEED the Infrastructure session.
Maybe I'll dope out enough this week on my own about Aggregators that I'll be able to take a seat in the Spirituality session.
Regardless, I'm comforted in the knowledge that I already have a friend in you, AKMA, and that you're just a short email away when I need you, or a scant 100 miles if the need is for a face to face!
Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing you in Cambridge, AKMA. What a wondeful world to have such bloggers in it.
Posted by: fp at September 30, 2003 11:31 AM