For the 7th post in our 12 days of microblogging series, I want to talk about linkblogging. Micro.blog users have a variety of approaches to posting links on their blog. Some people read an interesting article and type in a summary of it, pasting in the URL to the full article, and some people prefer quoting a portion of the text directly in their microblog post.
I blogged a couple of years ago in detail about the technical approaches to links in RSS and how linkblogging has evolved, using examples from Dave Winer and John Gruber:
Instead of just including a URL, authors use a quote from the linked material as the foundation for the post. The majority of Daring Fireball posts adopt this format. While John Gruber is known for his full essays, those longer posts are infrequent today. He keeps his site active by linking to other interesting essays and tacking on his own brief opinion.
Posts on Micro.blog are formatted with Markdown. If you’re reading a web page on iOS, you can share it to the Micro.blog app to automatically fill in the basic structure of a post, leaving the cursor at the beginning of the post to add your own thoughts.
In the screenshots above, I’m sharing from Safari on iOS. Micro.blog adds a Markdown link back to the original post with the web page title. Or if there’s text selected, Micro.blog includes that text as a quote.
Note that Micro.blog will truncate posts in the timeline when they are over 280 characters. For a longer quote, it’s best to give you microblog post a title, turning it into a full blog post.
Previous posts in this blog post series covered photo blogs, microcasting, travel blogs, custom designs, artwork on blogs, and more. Check out the full list on our help page.
