Finding the good stuff

I was listening to Twit the other day when the contributors were talking about their concern that too many blogs "just" pointed to stuff. I am not so sure that this is a problem and sort of rests on the, mistaken in my view, assumption that blogging has to be like journalism.

One of the original uses of blogs was to point to stuff and to add comment about why it was interesting enough to point to. A lot of the benefit I get from the bloggers in my aggregator is their ability to find and point to good stuff related to my interests and concerns. Yes there is also great original content in there but even if all they did was point to stuff I would still get value from subscribing to them.

This relates to a conversation I am having with someone in a news agency where I am arguing that part of the work of agencies has always been "finding the good stuff" from the mix of paid journalists, stringers and freelancers and is this so different from building a brand on finding the good stuff on the web?

Comments

[Lee Bryant]

Yes, pointing (signals) is very important. It's like saving your copper coins - easy to do and adds up to something valuable over the long term.

[Alan Coady]

Pointing is ok but what, I feel, is also required is some explanation of the connections which caused the topic to animate you in the first place.

[Antony Mayfield]

Spot on, again, Euan.

Lee - love the copper coins thing: you are the king of analogy.

[Dan]

Pointing to stuff was the original function of blogs. web logs. But then people started writing about their cats and the whole thing took a different turn.

[Euan]

Gee thanks!

[Hazel]

Thank you SO much for this post. I've always felt a bit apologetic about my two blogs (one for careers practitioners and one for small bsuiness people) as both are "pointing at" blogs.
All the "best" bloggers seem to be telling us that we should be writing new stuff and spending a long time over it and ...
Blow that. I use a blog as a way of communicating to my readership things that I've read in several hundred different places that I think will interest them -- and it works.

[John Caddell]

Euan,

Harper's Magazine here in the US leads off the magazine with the "Readings" section, where they - you guessed it - reprint articles originally found somewhere else.

Rather than thinking less of them for this derivative content, it's far and away my favorite part of the magazine.

regards, John

[Mark]

'Pointing to stuff' is an integral part of the web experience. The fact that online newspapers don't is often overlooked; by not linking, the building block of finding anything out about anything on the web, they are being bad 'web citizens'. If you don't point to stuff your site is an online cul-de-sac. See my post here: http://markhigginson.com/blog/2008/05/24/being-a-good-web-citizen/

[Robert McIntosh]

I've heard this referred to as bloggers being "Digital Curators"

read it here:
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/02/the-digital-cur.html