Judging from the massive take-up of the feature, I sometimes think that I must be the only person in the world who thinks that automated blog postings full of people’s bookmarks on delicious.com are really annoying. A lot of people who do this are excellent writers, producing content I love to read. It’s always a disappointment when a new post turns out to be an automated bookmarks post.
Of course, people have every right to put whatever they like in their blogs. If you know that I read your blog, and you use this feature of delicious.com, please don’t consider this post as a demand for you to stop - just think of it as just a little bit of (minority?) audience feedback. I’m still subscribed to you, despite your automated link postings. However, if you find that you secretly agree with me, why not just provide a link in your sidebar to allow me to subscribe to your bookmarks, and discontinue the evil robot postings!
Then again, there’s always the possibility that this is all my own fault for using a news feed reader (NetNewsWire) that doesn’t appear to have a feature for automatically discarding or marking posts as read according to a rule.
What do you think?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Personally I find it handy to get a quick overview of what my friends are checking out on the web. Personally I’m using the Feedburner “splicing” method of adding my link digests to my feed, which means that you can get the vanilla RSS feed of my blog direct from WP.com, or subscribe to my Feedburner feed and get intermixed daily del.icio.us postings too… which, on days when I don’t post a full entry, serves to prove that I’m still alive
I’m with you Ian; I don’t like it. It’s not always that I don’t want to know about their delicious links, but it seems more suited to the sidebar if you want it on a blog at all.
I think it might be my master data side coming out, but recently tagged links didn’t originate on a weblog. They are in delicious (or similar service) and already have a feed of their own. Isn’t friend feed the place to mix everything together into your own personal uber-stream? Or let your audience pick themselves by subscribing to delicious and weblog feeds separately.
Just my view, and I haven’t unsubscribed from anyone who does it either.