The Good, The Bad and The Unread: link me baby one more time

Two questions:

1. How in the hell do you 'link back' or whatever it is called. I see it a lot on Romancing the Blog, where a person comments and it is a link back to their blog. Is that trackback? If so how do you do this?

2. Is it a good thing to do this?
I am of two minds regarding this - yes shocking I know. On one hand I find when responding to blogs I am talking too much - yes even more shocking. And I don't want to take up that much room in someone's blog. WHY I don't know since I don't care how long people talk when responding to my blog. Go figure.

On the other hand, is that just a sneaky like way to get traffic to your blog? Or even if it isn't your point in doing it, how many people see it that way?

If you don't respond to the post and then go blog about it, is that shitty to the person who spent so much time creating that RTB post? Right now I generally just link to wherever or whatever got me started thinking on the subject the post is on. Yes I know I over think things.... and that ended up more than two questions ;)

blah I can't keep my eyes open... I guess five hours of sleep in three days isn't enough. And damn it I so want to redo and finish the crap I lost when I bluescreen while the computer is playing nice. I turned the firewall back on, changed nothing and it is working fine now. Knock on wood. eh I shall go see if I can get that housecall thing to run now.

New computer is the first thing on the fucking list of things to buy, well after I do something about that job thing.

7 Comments:

I actually like it when people talk a lot in their comments. Makes me feel better about when I go on and on when commenting on their blogs. What annoys me about commenting on blogger is that you can't directly reply to the person's comment like you can on lj. Instead you have to post a new comment and say their name so they know you're talking to them. It's a minor annoyance but still.

By Samantha, at 1/26/2006 09:03:00 AM
I don't have an answer but I do have a couple of thoughts.

1) Seems to me that choosing to post something linked to another blog on one's own blog rather than in the comments of the original, i.e. a trackback, would be most appropriate for a topical tangent - you know when someone's blog triggers a thought but not one directly related to what they posted about that one would feel rather guilty posting there anyway.

2) Why wouldn't linking back to other blogs be a good thing? This is the InterNET after all. Seriously, it's supposed to be a giant WEB of interLINKing information. I've always scratched my head over those sites that get all hyper about people actively sharing links. Inappropriate links might be a bad thing but to complain and be basically paranoid about on truly topic or even tangental ones? That's just weird.

Of course, that's just me.

By Bev (BB), at 1/26/2006 10:26:00 AM
Samantha: hee you changed your name didn't you? I was like hey that pic looks familiar! When I started reading romance about 3 years ago, I would post in my lj. And really think I was boring people. Since it is locked I didn't want to unlock the friends only so I went back and forth between doing another lj or creating a blog.

I ended up going with a blog just because most reader blogs were well done on blogger. At least at the time that I went to. I do wish now I had done a lj. Mainly because of the friends page you can do. With RSS feeds you can link to most blogs and have all the blogs you visit on one page.

Of course now I forget to update my lj. hee

Beverly: Both good points! I tend to ramble ;) and start with point A and end up somewhere around F. So honestly I have found myself deleting comments I would have left at RTB because they just seemed to long.

So then I was going to just post here... then I feel guilt to that person because their idea started it.

On reader blogs, at least with ones I go to often, I am not as worried because getting some long ass post from me wouldn't shock you guys. And if it annoyed you, you would tell me.

By sybil, at 1/26/2006 11:22:00 AM
1. You can't do a trackback with Blogger.

1b. I look at a trackback as a courtesy type of thing in that if someone's post inspired you to blog about the same topic, it's an easy way to let them know you're talking about them. It's also a give credit type of thing.

2. I started my book blog for the same reason you did. I felt like the people that were already reading my blog didn't sign up for a blog that talked about books every third post. So now that I have both, I weed out all the book posts to the book blog and leave all the rambly crap to the main blog.

3. Most blogs come with an RSS feed, you just have to look for the link. It's usually either an antenna looking thing or a box that says xml or something. It's just a matter or deciding which RSS reader you want to use. I used to use pluck but I also like bloglines. A lot of people also like Kinja.

By Anonymous, at 1/26/2006 02:11:00 PM
Well, yeah, Blogger doesn't have trackbacks but they have something called backlinks and here's the URL for the help topic on it: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1216&topic=23

Granted I haven't actually seen what it does in action but it's there. It's also a relatively new feature that might have to activated if one has had their blog and theme/format in place for a while.

By Bev (BB), at 1/26/2006 03:38:00 PM
Ha ha, yeah I decided to use my real first name instead of minxy.

And yeah that's pretty much the same reason I got a blog here too. I was boring most of my friends list talking about books so I grabbed the excuse to start an account here. I still post in my lj. Just not as much as I used to.

By Samantha, at 1/26/2006 08:23:00 PM
This is off-topic, but the one feature I wish blogger had is tags. I'd love to be able to group my posts in my sidebar by topic tags.

By Anonymous, at 1/26/2006 09:16:00 PM


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