Del.icio.us links on blog posts

It seems to be a growing trend for bloggers to publish regular posts of their recent del.icio.us links. Blogs which regularly publish link-only posts include Micro Persuasion, City of Sound and 43 Folders. I find this to be a minor, but unwelcome development. I already subscribe to far too many feeds and I suspect I’m not in a minority of RSS users in this regard. If I’m going to bother to subscribe to something, I’ll do so because I think that the feed has something interesting to say and isn’t going to won’t waste my time. I’m not interested in ‘more, more, more’, I’m interested in overview or detail, focus and insight. Aggregate postings of 10+ links represent a dilution of the essence of what I’m looking for in a good feed. Having to scan such posts is tiresome. If I see 5 new posts in my newsreader and then discover 2 or 3 of them consist of lists of links, I’m inclined not to wade through them, but instead to unsubscribe from that feed.

Here are my suggestions for improved service:

• Best – authors inclined to post links should provide a separate feed for links to give readers the choice. After all, it’s possible to do this already just by visiting an author’s del.icio.us page and subscribing to any tags a reader is interested in
• Alternative – post groups of links on a key subject as here and here
• Fallback – If you don’t want to do this, ask your readers for feedback – maybe I’m the only one annoyed by this trend!