Lazycoder

Do links really matter?

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. Occasionally I’ll see other people write about a topic either soon after I do or after I’ve had some kind of conversation with them about the topic. Sometimes they don’t link to my post or mention our conversation in their posts. Often the blogger in question has a lot more subscribers than me or in some way, more visibility. In the age of “page views” ,Techmeme, reddit, Digg, and “influencers” traffic, and subscribers, are king. Often when a high visibility person posts about a topic I’ve covered, they add more to the conversation or find an angle that I missed. Which increases the value of the topic or idea. I think some of these postings can be chalked up to coincidence. The odds of technology writers reading the same weblogs, social news sites, tech news sites, and being inspired to write about a topic they’ve both read are pretty good.

So if the point of your writing is to spread ideas or opinions that you’ve had, does a link really matter? Should you care if you get credit? I’m not talking about plagiarism. I mean something more along the lines of inspiration. I don’t think they do. As long as the message gets out, you should be happy.

The point here isn’t to whine about not getting my due. Because I don’t really care about traffic or subscribers. I started a weblog to practice writing and communicating ideas. And, as someone reminded me last night, it ain’t writing if it’s marked “draft”. I do use Feedburner, but mainly because it’s almost seamless to use in WordPress and it is interesting to see how many people are subscribed to me. I’m hooked up to Google Analytics because I like to see who is linking to specific posts and participating in a conversation with me. Trackbacks aren’t reliable.