The lowly link blog is the gateway to abundance
Rex Sorgatz has a short bit in Wired 15.03 on linkblogs, xBlog’s preferred format for 7+ years:
“The link blog was the first Internet organism, built from a collection of the simplest cellular units of the networked society: links. This sprawling ecosystem of social aggregators, page-rank spoofers, and quirky filters compresses ideas down to their inner nucleus. The primary organs - mass aggregators like Digg, Fark.com, and del.icio.us - arrange piles upon piles of user-submitted pages, hoping some wisdom reveals itself in the opinions of dark and formless crowds. Meanwhile, solitary link bloggers like kottke.org, Waxy.org, and your secret favorite link collector ignore the vast universe of the mediocre to reveal undiscovered morsels yet to be appraised by the algorithmic machines.
The link is its own genre: sparsely worded, underlined, a discrete distillation of a new world that lies on the other side of a click. Such a simple form, yet it connects two universes. By filtering and condensing, the link blog turns online chaos into a tidy little stack of clickable potential.”