My Approach to Running a Link Blog

Metadata

• Author: Simon Willison’s Weblog
• Full Title: My Approach to Running a Link Blog
• URL: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#atom-everything

Highlights

• I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2023—publishing links (which I called “blogmarks”) with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a “via” links where appropriate. (View Highlight)
• In April of this year I finally upgraded my link blog to support Markdown, allowing me to expand my link blog into something with a lot more room. (View Highlight)
• The way I use my link blog has evolved substantially in the eight months since then. I’m going to describe the informal set of guidelines I’ve set myself for how I link blog, in the hope that it might encourage other people to give this a try themselves. (View Highlight)
• The point of that article was to emphasize that blogging doesn’t have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all). (View Highlight)
• In that article I proposed two categories of content that are low stakes and high value: things I learned and descriptions of my projects. I realize now that link blogging deserves to be included a third category of low stakes, high value writing. We could think of that category as things I’ve found. (View Highlight)
• When I first started link blogging I would often post a link with a one sentence summary of the linked content, and maybe a tiny piece of opinionated commentary. (View Highlight)
• I always include the names of the people who created the content I a linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past. If I’ve linked to someone’s work three or more times I also try to notice and upgrade them to a dedicated tag. (View Highlight)
• I try to add something extra. My goal with any link blog post is that if you read both my post and the source material you’ll have an enhanced experience over if you read just the source material itself. • Ideally I’d like you to take something useful away even if you don’t follow the link itself. This can be a slightly tricky balance: I don’t wont to steal attention from the authors and plagiarize their message. Generally I’ll try to find some key idea that’s worth emphasizing. Slightly cynically, I may try to capture that idea as backup against the original source vanishing from the internet. Link rot is real! • My most basic version of this is trying to provide context as to why I think this particular thing is worth reading—especially important for longer content. A good recent example is my post about Anthropic’s Building effective agents essay the other day. • I might tie it together to other similar concepts, including things I’ve written about in the past, for example linking Prompt caching with Claude to my coverage of Context caching for Google Gemini. • If part of the material is a video, I might quote a snippet of the transcript (often extracted using MacWhisper) like I did in this post about Anthropic’s Clio. • A lot of stuff I link to involves programming. I’ll often include a direct link to relevant code, using the GitHub feature where I can link to a snippet as-of a particular commit. One example is the fetch-rss.py link in this post. (View Highlight)
• ’m liberal with quotations. Finding and quoting a paragraph that captures the key theme of a post is a very quick and effective way to summarize it and help people decide if it’s worth reading the whole thing. My post on François Chollet’s o3 ARC-AGI analysis is an example of that. (View Highlight)
• If the original author reads my post, I want them to feel good about it. I know from my own experience that often when you publish something online the silence can be deafening. Knowing that someone else read, appreciated, understood and then shared your work can be a very pleasant thing (View Highlight)
• A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I’ve read it. This is more for me than for anyone else: I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that. (View Highlight)
• I’ve started leaning more into screenshots and even short video or audio clips. A screenshot can be considered a visual quotation—I’ll sometimes snap these from interesting frames in a YouTube video or live demo associated with the content I’m linking to. I used a screenshot of the Clay debugger in my post about Clay. (View Highlight)

• I wish people would post more links to interesting things

  I feel like Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok have pushed a lot of people out of the habit of doing that, by penalizing shared links in the various “algorithms”

  Bluesky doesn’t have that misfeature, thankfully!

  (In my ideal world everyone would get their own link blog too, but sharing links on Bluesky and Mastodon is almost as good) Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large. (View Highlight)