Charlie Owen - Is Linking Shameful Behavior...?

Friday, March 30, 2007

I'm a regular follower of the Adobe blog over at http://blogs.adobe.com/ and generally speaking I learn a lot (note I'm a passionate Adobe products user, particularly PhotoShop and Illustrator). Every once in a while they throw rocks towards Microsoft, and it does leave me with a bad taste. Case in point: In 'Why Apollo?' Andrew Shebanow writes...

"I normally don't like to do those "me too" sorts of posts Microsoft folks seem to specialize in, where you just say "look at this great article my coworker wrote". To me, its always seemed like a rather distasteful way to do PageRank/TechMeme manipulation."

As for me, when I link to another Microsoft employee blog it's because I found the information helpful or new. For example, Aaron Stebner recently posted Mailbag: How can I create a loading page for an MCML application? and I linked to it from our team platform blog here.

Why...?

I didn't know Aaron was working on this, and thought it was quite neat, and that others would find it highly useful.
I try to make it a point to aggregate all great technical docs in one place on our Windows Media Center Platform Team blog (makes search easier).
There are bound to be folks who subscribe to our platform team blog but NOT Aarons blog -- they might not see this great resource unless I link.

Furthermore, I don't link to every one of Aarons posts (like this one, or that one or the one over here which is related to Windows Media Center development). For the most part, where and when I link is highly correlated to my opinion of the value of the material. It's not part of some uber conspiracy to manipulate the system. And I don't think most Microsoft bloggers link for the sake of linking.

Andrew, I don't think I would have discovered Why Apollo? or Mike Chambers had you not linked. That's exactly WHY you want to link -- to show your readers who you read, or listen to, or respect -- even if they happen to work for the same company you do.

I don't think it's distateful -- it's actually respectful in most cases.

Besides, you can always unsubscribe if you find the linking to be gratuitous.

Categories: Blog | Comments [3] |

| Posted on Friday, March 30, 2007 6:24:04 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Friday, March 30, 2007 7:58:26 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Thanks for the feedback. As I told one commentor on my blog, I went a bit too far into "rant mode" on that post. There are a lot of folks out there who have really interesting link blogs, like Robert Scoble. I see plenty of value in such things. I just want to add more value in my posts than that.

I think my frustration comes from the fact that I subscribe to a lot of blogs, including 80 or so from Microsoft employees. It drives me nuts to see 10 or 15 more or less identical blog posts saying "go look at this" and nothing else. But that doesn't mean links have no value.

Andrew Shebanow

Sunday, April 01, 2007 4:49:14 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

People blog for many different reasons. I am one of those who blogs as a way of keeping the clients I work with informed about the areas I cover professionally. If others happen to read my blog and find it useful then thats great. Since I am trying to keep my clients informed about tech topics I do a great deal of linking so they can come to my site as a sort of aggregator around Office and SharePoint. Many of us field folks do the same thing but again we are mostly blogging to keep our immediate clients up to date so they don't have to do the work of tracking down all the information.

Michael Gannotti

Friday, May 11, 2007 5:32:28 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I think my frustration comes from the fact that I subscribe to a lot of blogs, including 80 or so from Microsoft employees.

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