Sharing links with a wider audience is a great idea and when Google came up with the idea of you being able to share links to blog posts that you found interesting it met with almost instant success. The people who use Newsgator products can do something similar but due to market penetration base on shear size of the userbase it doesn’t have as big a following of users.

Now the basic premise of these shared link feeds; whether through GReader or FeedDemon, is that this is where we can post those things we find interesting but don’t get our creative juice flowing enough to write something about; or is out of our normal blogging subject matter. Great idea in principal and generally it works very well. We get to find out about new bloggers or subject matters that gets our creative juice flowing.

I’ve been noticing something though over the past little while and it is irritating the hell out of me. More and more bloggers are using their shared links feed to promote their own posts or the posts of some blog network that they are a part of. Granted we have gotten use to the same sort of thing happening on Twitter and FriendFeed - hell even I will throw up a message with a link to a fresh post on WinExtra.

I understand the need to promote oneself especially in the crowded world of the blogosphere but I don’t believe using things like shared link feeds to promote ones own posts is the right use of them. If anything I believe that this practice will in the end do nothing more than dilute the usefulness of them. We have plenty of ways to promote our blogs but this shouldn’t be one of them.

In the end; especially as services like FriendFeed gain a wider audience, you are only going to piss off the users of those services. This includes those folks that subscribe to shared link feeds as they didn’t sign up to them in order to see double posting of blog posts. They signed up to them because they are interested in reading the other stuff they you find and share. This posting of our own blog posts to shared link feeds does nothing more than waste the reader’s time in exchange for a little bit of link juice.

Is pissing off your readers really worth it?

Conversation Tags: shared link feeds, GReader, FeedDemon, self-promotion