I’ve started a new Links section: just a link, with just enough description for you to decide if you want to click. It has a its own feed; to read it, subscribe to that feed separately or to the newsletter, which will include occasional link posts.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s A Link Blog in the Year 2024. Some of my favorite blogs are linkblogs too!
I think people underestimate the linkblog. Kellan says it’s “the very definition of something that no one needs”. In Nelson Minar’s post about his linkblog, he isn’t quite so pessimistic, but expresses a desire for more reach and says “I accept what I’m doing is not mainstream”. Fair enough, but: I think linkblogs are one of those things with outsized impact compared to their direct userbases1.
I suspect that while they are not read by very many people in absolute terms, the bloggers who contribute the most to the zeitgeist are almost all readers of linkblogs. I also believe that linkblogs contribute significantly to blog discovery. A huge number of the blogs in my feed reader came to me via linkblogs.
When thinking about linkblogs, I also think there are more types than is widely acknowledged. Here’s a sample among blogs I personally read:
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Feeds of individual links
Some blogs in this category might be RSS-only — based on Nelson’s post linked above, it sounds like that used to be the case for his linkblog.
Other blogs here might have a separate web page for each source link.
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Feeds of individual links with commentary
- Daring Fireball (which has claimed the excellent name “Linked List”)
- Pixel Envy
- aliquote.org
- jwz’s blog
- kottke.org
- Simon Willison’s Weblog
- One Foot Tsunami
Some blogs here also have essays or microposts that don’t include links, while others are exclusively about the links.
For link posts, some blogs may have the RSS feed point to the source, while others point it to a page on the linkblog.
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Link periodicals
- Trivium
- Nixers Newsletter (also available via RSS)
- jatan.space
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Blogs that intermix periodic link posts with other posts
- Michael Tsai
- Interconnected
- Astral Codex Ten (including for years at Slate Star Codex), for example Links For December 2025
- Brett Terpstra, for example Web Excursions for January 12nd, 2026
- The Diff, for example Longreads + Open Thread from January 17th
- Construction Physics, for example Reading List 01/24/26
- Ozy Brennan’s Thing of Things, for instance Linkpost for December
I noticed a minor trend of these intermittent link posts among Substack newsletters. I suspect that Substack’s easy monetization has played a role here — link posts reuse some ingredients that go into essays for extra content but still keeps readers engaged. This requires less effort than a new essay, but enough that some free blog authors don’t consider it worth doing.
Personally, my favorite format for reading are blogs of the first two types. I think this is easier to keep track of, especially as I may be looking briefly at my feed reader while I’m waiting on something else.
I track the links I want to post in my Raindrop account with a #linkblog tag.
Irregularly, I pull them down via a Python script into a YAML file kept in Hugo
site data.
I add my commentary as minimal markdown in that YAML file,
and a Hugo content adapter
assembles the result into one page per link.
Further reading:
- The Linkblogging chapter of the micro.blog book
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It reminds me of the influence that Twitter users used to have over newspapers of record. Twitter was not the largest social network, and was rarely even profitable, but it counted the overwhelming majority of professional journalists among its users, and their combined influence repeatedly disciplined news organizations for years. I think the influence of the linkblog is smaller than this, without as much power concentration and, I think most critically, lacking the interactivity of 2010s social media, so I am not concerned that its impact will be as negative as Twitter’s. ↩︎