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.”

“There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us — so seemingly obvious — that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here’s a case in point — the weblog post’s permalink. I mean — let’s think about it. The problem was that a weblog’s front page is by far its most visited page. This is the page where everyone actually sees your content (or at least it was until the creation of RSS feeds). But it’s not possible for someone to effectively bookmark or link to that particular entry on that page, because shortly it will scroll off the bottom.”

Bummer. Haddock was one of the first links in my late ’90s daily weblog travels: “If you’re one of Haddock.org’s few regular visitors you’ve probably noticed that the Haddock Directory part of the site had its last daily update in October. After updating the Directory every day (well, kind of) since its launch in 1997 I’d finally had enough of the dull and thankless task earlier last year.”

“Late last year, in my predictions post for 2007, I mentioned something I called, quite uninventively, ‘Blog 2.0.’ More specifically I wroteL ‘10. “Blog 2.0′ will become a reality. By this I mean that Version 1.0 blogsites, of which I think Searchblog is a good example, will begin to look dated and fade in comparison to sites that employ better approaches to content management, navigation, intelligent widgets and web services, etc.’”

Ha! “‘Our corporate blog will give us a voice the consumer will be able to identify with as they buy into the lifestyle our product is selling!’ No, Mr. Businessman, corporate blogs STILL suck.” (Thanks Fimoculous!)

“Yesterday was my last day at TechCrunch. It’s been a good run but I’m excited to get back into consulting for non profit organizations and startup businesses. This is a post about how I did my research while writing for TechCrunch, written in the belief that the more valuable information a person shares the more likely they are to be hired to share even more information as a consultant.”

frogdesign starts a blog: “There’s been a lot of attention on the intersection of the business and design worlds recently. The goal of this blog is to explore some of the many topics that fall under this broad umbrella. Some of these areas: strategic decision-making, innovation strategy, systematizing innovation, business transformation, new tools and methodologies, and education. And whatever else happens to strike my fancy.”

“Blogging can be a hugely rewarding and satisfying hobby, or in some cases job. But it does have its tough times, especially when it comes to composing, publishing, and announcing your posts. Fortunately for those users on the Mac platform there are some great tools to streamline your blogging process — let’s take a look.”

“Jason Kottke started kottke.org on March 1998. Before kottke.org, he did a variety of personal projects online, including the well-regarded episodic web site 0sil8. He has a BA in Physics from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In February 2005, Jason famously left his job as a Web designer to start blogging full-time, supported by donations from his readers. One year later, he retired the ‘micropatron’ experiment and joined an ad network to support his site. He now blogs and designs websites. He is 32, and lives in New York City with his wife, Meg Hourihan.” Also, Kottke on How I Blog.

“The first session at Webvisions is Matt Haughey talking about blogging professionally. Here are my notes from his talk.”

“InformationWeek interviewed five accidental entrepreneurs, including the founders of del.icio.us and Digg and the author of the blog Dooce, to find out how they freed themselves from the paycheck-to-paycheck grind.”

Matt Haughey: “I’ve been meaning to write about this for weeks now, but this July I’ll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland on how to make a living blogging. I haven’t talked about it very much here, but ever since I started dabbling in making a little revenue from my blogs, things have went well and revenue grew to the point that last fall I got to quit my job to tend to my web things full time. It’s been both stressful to make the leap and tremendously rewarding.”

Upon my return to civilization last week, Greg Knauss wrote up some thoughts he had after doing the remaindered links here for two weeks… ‘Like most of the disasters I’ve had a hand in, I’ve got a theory that both explains what happened and exonerates me. Ducking responsibility sounds better if you put on academic airs about it. The theory: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. Kottke is one. I, now two weeks too late in realizing this, am another.’”

Wow, this is a blast from the past that I had forgotten about! Remember way back when, when xBlog was one of the 50 most popular/linked blogs in the world, ranked just ahead of Zeldman? Weird. In the last six years we have seen A LOT of good weblogs come and go, most of them passing us by as we sit here posting link after link. Well, here’s to another six years of linklog xBlog love. Have a great weekend, everyone. -bk

A list linking to things like del.icio.us, Last.fm, Flickr, Bitty Browser, etc…