James Robertson, who never seems to be afraid to tell it like it is, gets critical of Scoble's Link Blog. I'm going to have to agree with him on this one.

I've looked at Scoble's link blog a few times and it's just a big list of partially quoted posts. I've never subscribed to it. While it might be more convenient for him to dump a bunch of links quickly like that, I think it's having an important negative effect on the quality of his original blog.

Before I get into any criticisms of my own I think it's important to say that I value a person's right to choose about the content of their blog. If someone doesn't like your blog, they shouldn't read it -- it's that simple.

But Scoble's blog is on another level: it's almost a community on its own. I'm not saying he has more responsibility to his readers than any other blogger, but when he preaches about community building and doing that by linking to others, he should be careful to walk the walk to protect his credibility.

That's where the link blog fails. People enjoy being linked from Scoble's main blog because they get lots of traffic and discussion. I doubt they feel the same way about being linked from the link blog. It just doesn't have the same impact, the same community building force.

When you look at the pace he was going at though, he doesn't have much of a choice. Who on earth tries to personally aggregate 2000 blogs? People just don't scale like that, and it was bound to catch up to him and his blog. Is there an easy solution? No. Is Scoble's link blog a good solution? It might be for others, but it's not for me. I won't be subscribing, and that's unfortunate because Scoble often finds interesting stuff reading feeds and through his contacts.

I have a link blog too: my bullet blog on the right. I put only links there, and only stuff I really want people to notice. It goes in spurts, but I might add five links a week. Notice they are undated. Mark Pilgrim also has a link blog on the same page as his main blog.

I like this approach better because it's a solid connection between the main blog and the link blog. There's a credibility aspect to that, and the links are still in a high profile enough spot to be noticed by your blog traffic. Unfortunately this solution would probably not scale to Scoble's needs.

Update Sat 12:29 Scoble linked to this post on that link blog and I got less than a dozen referrals from it ... maybe my post title wasn't catchy enough? Maybe his link blog doesn't have many readers? Maybe many of his link blog readers are gone for the weekend? Many he just posted too many links in one day? Could be one of many reasons ... but any way you slice it, it seems that a link on the link blog doesn't have nearly the same community-building impact as a link on the Scobleizer.

Why am I picking on Robert? I'm not. :) I just find his blog and blogging to be an interesting case study. What he blogs is viewed by many times more people than most blogs, so he has special issues he has to deal with. Who knows, we may all be able to blog with the volume he does in the future but easier because we have better tools and procedures. We'll get better at blogging by watching extreme bloggers like Robert Scoble while thinking about and trying out ways to make reaching and communicating with communities easier. Blogging is still young -- there's lots of room for improvement on both ends of the channel; blogging and feed aggregation.