Quoting Whole Posts

From Scbole:

Diego wants off of my link blog

Diego doesn’t want me to republish his blog posts. So far he’s the third person to ask me to stop doing that on my linkblog. What do I do? Simply unsubscribe so that I don’t see their posts anymore and am not tempted to link to them.

I used to do just headlines but, personally, that format is useless.

Why do I do my linkblog? For several reasons:

1) New readers need a way to find new blogs. I don’t quote every post from someone’s blog, just the most interesting ones to me. Out of 3,500 posts I usually put 100 on my link blog.

2) As a store for me to do my own searches later on. If I only had headlines in my RSS feed this would be useless. Instead, now, I have a way for me to find things that I found interesting months later.

3) As a way to get traffic and search engine juice to the people I find interesting. One link from this blog is worth quite a bit of Page Rank. Why? Because a lot of people link to it. Because of my publishing tool (Kunal Das wrote the tool, named OutlookMT).

4) It’s pretty clear after reading my linkblog for a while that everything there came from someplace else and every item links back to its original owner.

5) I’m doing this for people who are overloaded with information and want to keep up to date on what the tech blogosphere is doing. It’s a lot easier to read 100 items a day than 3,500.

How do I do this blog? I read all my feeds and anything I find interesting I drag over to a folder named “Blog This.” That item is automatically placed on my link blog.

I also greatly appreciate Matt Mullenweg. He’s donating the hosting and the back-end technology (it’s running on WordPress).

I do find it interesting that Diego finds my linkblog interesting to read. It’s interesting BECAUSE it has full-text reprints. If you want pure headline link blogs you can check those out on del.icio.us or bloglines. They simply aren’t as useful.

I have quoted his whole post. Seemed kind of appropriate.

The thing is, I can’t understand this attitude one bit. This sort of request really begs the question: why are you writing a blog? Jeez, most people would be delighted to have their stuff highlighted by Scoble, I know I was. It means you get a whole load of new readers, and lets you know you are on the right lines. At the end of the day, readers might not need to visit your blog to read that particular post, but, in general blog readers are an inquisitive lot and will visit your site and subscribe if they like what they see. So, if anyone wants to quote my witterings in full, in part or whatever, go right ahead!

More here and here.

My link blog also quotes in full, though I have to admit that I doubt many people ever see mine. Still, if anyone doesn’t like it, let me know.