Low threshold links

Posted byCameron MarlowPosted inBlogging

get on the link chainSometime around the beginning of this year, I realized that I was encountering way too many sites to write an individual weblog post about each and every one. My threshold for what to post was way to high to catch many of the sites I was laughing at, engaged by, and sending on to my friends. Instead of losing these links thanks to my imperfect brain, I decided like many others to create a separate weblog just for the ephemeral sites that didn’t deserve discussion.

And so my oddments was born.

Ever since, I’ve become obsessed with finding more of them. They’re like crack. The part I love best is that when I’m truly bored, hitting reload in my RSS reader almost always turns up something. And more than anything else, these new lists facilitate the rapid spread of memes across the universe.

Following is a list of my favorite low-threshold link sites, roughly in the order that I discovered them. Send me an email or post a comment with yours and I’ll add you to the list.


[RSS] Josh Schachter’s Muxway

[RSS] Anil Dash’s Daily Links

[RSS] Jason Kottke’s Remaindered Links

[RSS] My very own oddments

[RSS] Matt Webb’s Mini-links

[RSS] Erik Benson’s Morale-O-Meter

[RSS] Dan Ehrlich’s Wanderings

[RSS] Paul Hammond’s Links

[RSS] Graham Leuschke’s Quick Links

[RSS] Michael Sippey’s Recently Browsed

[RSS] Todd Dominey’s Enjoying

[RSS] Merlin Mann’s Recent Links

[RSS] Mike’s QuickLinks

[RSS] Andrew Raff’s Linky Linky

[RSS] Ernie Hsiung’s Mini-blog

[RSS] Alan Taylor’s Ephemera

[RSS] Jim Ray’s Diversions

[RSS] Pete Ashton’s Linkfarm

[RSS] Jason Shellen’s On the side

[RSS] Arbitrary Secondaries

[RSS] mindless link propagation

[RSS] Jason Toney’s Peripheral Vision

60 thoughts on “Low threshold links”

  1. My adoption of “low threshold linking” was inspired in part by your oddments, but mostly by Gary’s indefatigable efforts at dangerousmeta.com. Gary’s a bad-ass.

  2. Surprisingly, daniel in the previous comment called garret ‘gary’ but his dangerousmeta should be back up and running in a few days or less as he transitions from a Zope-grown system to MT. Meaning he ought to have an RSS feed going forward, but worth reading either way.

  3. I’d seen Anil’s, Kottke’s, and Muxway when I started mine (here, or linked to my name below), but what really got me moving on it was discovering the joy of Movable Type’s posting bookmarklet. It’s almost too easy.

  4. I knew that I forgot someone. A referral from your quick links Graham, followed by a subsequent addition to my RSS reader is what prompted this post in the first place.

  8. Both myself and my friend Rick Bradley have been maintaining input and output “bins” for well over a year now. Your Oddments, Kottke’s Remainders, Anil Dash’s links, etc were not extant when we began experimenting with this. We both post to our bins via email and have found it an extremely efficient method of quickly redistributing information. You are welcome to pull my composite io feed or individually my input and output feeds. Also, there are RDF/RSS1.0 feeds for Rick’s input and output.

    I have very recently (within the last couple of weeks) redesigned my website and am experimenting with tagging my links with additional metadata. Now on the io page you will see an additional category specification and a source citation if applicable to each link. My feeds are still RSS 0.91 but at some point I plan to switch to a richer syndication format and syndicate the additional metadata as well.

    The next step for me will be an IMAP accessible aggregator so that I can browse incoming feeds in mutt and with the touch of a button forward them into my own distribution channel. I’ve still got a long list of issues to work out with this though and no time to work on it at the moment.

  11. The Morning News does have an RSS feed for their headlines, but unfortunately each day is glommed into one post. I think the revolution of the low-threshold links is that it’s almost like a push medium. Posting an entire day’s worth of links at once ruins the effect for me.

  15. thanks for providing a name for what amounts to posting your history log to the net. I started this month, sometimes commenting, sometimes not.

  16. I have come up with criteria for what I consider a link pushing site. It’s the simple combination of:

    1. Frequent updates
    2. Individual RSS entries for each link
    3. Short, descriptive titles and comments
    4. RSS that links to other sites, not posts on the host site

    It’s a great standard to adhere to (and most of these sites do, with maybe the one exception of muxway). Perhaps I’ll make a post with some MT templates to make a list of your own.

    How do people include theirs? SSI? I build my page with ASP and I’m sure I’m not the norm.

  18. While we’re on the topic, I might as well mention that I put together a quick script a while ago that lets people put a link list on their site. It’s a perl script that automatically generates html, javascript (so you can include it on an existing page), and rss, and can be used as a bookmarklet. It’s available here, the second item down called Morale Links. For Movable Type users, it’s probably just as easy to just set it up with that… but there must be two or three people out there still that don’t use MT… right?

  21. I think we covered most of the lists that I steal links from read regularly, except that I also check in on Ernie’s LYD mini-links over at littleyellowdifferent.com

  23. Okay, I succumbed to this recently as well – and have to say it’s pretty addictive to build these lists, even more so to consume them via RSS. I even made it simpler (lower the threshhold even further) for me to post with a bookmarklet. Like I need more diversions – sheesh. My links are here (lower right, ephemera), and RSS feed is here. (Oh, mine is built with ASP as well, Cameron)

  25. I started a little sideblog last summer, and I just noticed that it’s starting to read just like my main weblog did when I started (filtering links with a bit of comment). I have a horrible feeling the sideblog is going to break away on into a full fleged weblog, requiring a sideblog of it’s own…

  33. Ross Mayfield, I completely agree. I have a Quickies TypeList but alas it does not have a feed. I am petitioning TypePad for that feature.

  35. Mine is kind of odd, since it’s a full-on blog with occasional commentary. But it’s a remainder site because I post stuff that I don’t feel like commenting on in depth.

    Found on the Web [RSS]

    I’ve done it this way since 2001, but it was my main blog until 2002.

  40. Not to stupidly self-promote, but I threw together a link-blogging tool that draws from new bookmarks I’ve tossed into a folder in Safari throughout the day:

    http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/BookmarkBlogger

    Currently, it only works with Safari and blosxom blogging software, and is hackish. However, it’s a nice process:

    See something you like, hit Cmd-D and then return.

    If you want to add a comment, it’s Cmd-D, right arrow, ^^^, a comment, return.

    If this sounds interesting to anyone, I could be motivated to make it read other browsers’ bookmarks and post to other blogging software.

  45. I have a pretty large aggregation of RSS feeds, but based on users in an IRC that have added themselves to my database versus links I’ve hand picked.

    [RSS] #JoiIto RSS Roll

    It seems that idea is similar to what’s being talked about here. it’s my version of low threshold links.

  57. I have a pretty large aggregation of RSS feeds, but based on users in an IRC that have added themselves to my database versus links I’ve hand picked.

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