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.

I’ve always wondered about this…

UK professor concludes: cellphones don’t cause gas station fires

Maybe MythBusters isn’t a solid enough scientific authority for Connecticut state senator Andreas Stillman, who wants to ban the use of cellphones when you’re filling up your car, but a professor from University of Kent in the UK has decided to settle once and for all whether cellphones can cause gas station fires (technically he studied whether cellphones cause petrol station fires, but we’re pretty sure his research applies to the rest of the world). He studied all 243 gas station fires from the past 11 years that were supposedly sparked by cellphones and determined that not a single one was actually caused by a handset. The actual cause of most of these fires? Static electricity, which is what everyone who actually knows anything about this stuff has been saying all along.

Some good advice from Susan Mernit:

How to grow your (blogging) audience

The traffic to this blog has gone up in the past three months, and it’s surely at least in part a result of some things I consciously put into practice. So, in the interests of transparency and sharing, here are some best practices: Post consistently…

My link blog has now moved to Blogger. This is so I can use BlogJet to dump stuff to it quickly and easily – something I couldn’t do with the BlogLines blog.

This might be useful and worth checking out, from Renee Blodgett

Blogzine launches, which is New Communications Forum’s new bi-monthly online publication dedicated to exploring new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, (including blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, search marketing, etc.).

It aims to discuss the growing phenomena of participatory communications and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business and society at large.

Their first issue explores the evolution of new models for journalism, PR, brand marketing, and advertising, and a contribution from blogger Jeremy Wright.

Quite a few interesting posts by Steve Rubel on Micro Persuasion recently, which I am still catching up on.

Folksonomies Turn Chaos Into Information

eWeek: The new term “Folksonomy” has emerged to describe the potential for user-defined tags to organically develop structure out of what might appear to be chaotic collections of information. One of the uncertainties about tags is how they can fit together among various services and what meaning can be gleaned from the tags of a large mass of users.

I haven’t really had much involvement with tagging, on Flickr I rarely bother. But more and more sites seem to be emerging using this technology and maybe it’s time I gave it some consideration.

Get a Job in Blogging

Want to get paid for thinking about blogging? There are plenty of blogging related jobs available via indeed.com. And there’s even a feed to keep track of them. 

However unrealistic, I am going to have to do this. Having a job where I could just do this all the time? Great!

Great result for Forest today.Link below from the Guardian. More to follow when I get back online.

Championship round-up

Championship: Sunderland went top with a win over Coventry, as Wigan could only draw against Nottingham Forest.

I really can see us staying up now. In Megson we have the best manager in the division, and now things are tightened up a the back, when we get some of the injured players back, we should be in a strong position come the run-in.

I have been playing with Microsoft’s OneNote (guessed at URL) software. It’s huge for what is for me just a Notepad replacement! At the moment I am just using one of the many possible screens to record notes and URLs I might want to visit in the future. It certainly offers a bit more flexibility than good old Notepad and makes a very useful scratchpad. Will post further should I actually do anything more with it…

Jason Kottke writes on: My business influences

As you may have noticed by reading the site in the past year, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about companies…how they succeed, why they fail, how to approach them from a holistic sense so they make sense on a human scale and not just from a business perspective, that sort of thing. In deciding to start my own little company of one, here are a few things I’ve run across that have influenced how I’m approaching it.

…

I don’t have many heroes, but Craig Newmark is definitely one of them. He’s had offers to sell craigslist for millions of dollars, many offers from VCs, he could charge for all listings on the site, or he could fill the site with advertising, but this is what he wants out of craigslist (via Wired): “get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world”. The many articles I’ve read about Craig have really reinforced for me that you need to let your values drive business decisions and not the other way around.

I’ve mentioned this a few times on the site before, but Ludicorp, the makers of Flickr, has the one of the best quotes about business I’ve ever read on their about page. It’s an excerpt from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus:

Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

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Dave Eggers gets a lot of crap, but I like the way he’s trying to run McSweeney’s:

But the way that McSweeney’s is run is, “Can there be a way that what they call mid-list authors, people who don’t sell in the Danielle Steel category, can still have an audience and still make a living?” McSweeney’s has very little overhead, to the degree that we can sell 6,000 copies of somebody’s book, and he can still get a decent amount of money, because he’s getting more per book because of the low overhead. That’s still our goal. I was just sort of going along with the same business model, like, “If we sell 50,000 copies, then everyone will do fine, and life will stay quiet.”

Not trying to take over the world, just doing something in balance with the lives of everyone concerned.

…

There are lots more people other there doing wonderful things with their business lives (37signals, the independent Mac developers like Ranchero, Delicious Monster, and Panic, etc.) but that’s enough for now.

From Ken Leebow: Blogging 101 From Website101

http://website101.com/RSS-Blogs-Blogging/index.html
Website101 offers over 30 articles on blogs, RSS Feeds and how to use them to enhance your business. If you know someone who is a new to the world of blogs, this site could be very useful.

Haven’t had a chance to look at this yet, am working offline, but will definately look these up.