Blog popularity inversely proportional to amount of "linking"
Summary: people link to bloggers that provide more original content than who just provide links to other places that do so.
Funny because I was just thinking about this regarding this blog. I think it's cool when people enjoy what I provide on this blog, but I really don't care if people read it or not. This is where I keep track of stories and topics that interest me, instead of saved emails or bookmarks that I never look at again. I can always go back and find what I found interesting and what I wrote about it. Pretty cool in my book.
My blog doesn't really have many that link to it and probably the fact that I post many links without a lot of commentary a lot of the time is a good reason why. But I disagree that nobody links to linkers. I personally like blogs because they act as filters or lenses that focus news and interesting content. There are tons of blogs but I like the ones whose mix of topics coincides most with what I'm interested in. Even if they just link to other places, that's fine with me. It's the filtering service that is the value-add, not necessarily original content.
That said, I have anecdotal evidence that my blog only gets noticed when I post original content. My recent entry about SOA security is a perfect example. I also was thinking about how I like the SANS newsbites because they actually summarize the stories they link to, not just provide links (on a related note, the links in Crypto-Gram require me to go read every story that sounds interesting so I generally read fewer of them).
No-one links to the linkers at Andrew Garrett’s Mutation