Warren Ellis so completely misses the point of linkblogs that I feel compelled to respond:
"...no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BoingBoing crew anyway"
The simplest counterproof is to consider mp3 blogs (or mp3 links among others in any blog)-- I've never found a blog with musical links that come within 1% of my own tastes, and I don't ever expect to, but I'd dearly love it if everybody maintained a musical linkblog at some site that allowed easy comparison of favorites-lists (like
iMeem).
Ditto, to a lesser extent, for favorite books and movies, graphic arts, humor, food, philosophy, gossip, politics, etc.
So ultimately, BoingBoing is an extremely LAME lowest-common-denominator linkblog by four distinct personalities, who surely filter their own tastes to fit the rut they've built for themselves (eg, they seem to leave music out almost entirely?).
But in the blogosphere-to-come, everyone should put themselves out there 100%, linking everything they like, and subscribing only to those feeds that match their own tastes best. The idea that BoingBoing has won the status of an 'indie NewYorkTimes' makes me puke!
Del.icio.us does hosting best, for now... though their format is barely readable.
Linkbloggers also need to study how to craft short headlines that boil down stories to their essence-- hardly anybody has even recognised the importance of this. (When I read the newspaper, I often have to read several paragraphs before I can extract the simple obvious core concepts that should have been in the headline.) The point of headlines/linktext is to make it unnecessary to read the whole article, unless you really want to.
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