Linkbloggers and Curators con’t.
It’s a bit sloppy of me to accuse Kottke of being a “first poster”. I don’t think that’s his goal at all. However, the whole “curation” thing… well, when I brought up the whole cocktail party simile, I wanted it to be clear that Kottke, as well as a lot of other smarty-pants blogs, like to put themselves out there as a proposed starting point for ideas and discussion (and entertainment!) rather than an actual source of research, creativity or true discovery. 99.99% of these weblog postings never get past that starting point. So while Kottke and his peers are well-informed, the value of their output is still considerably less than that of a person who is a reliable direct source of creativity. It’s the “breadth vs. depth” problem, and from the way I see it, broadly knowledgeable people are a dime a dozen (though they all want to be well known for it!) while people with deep and focused knowledge tend to have greater achievements. Don’t believe me that broad knowledge has little value? Ask Kottke himself how his tip-jar monetization idea went a few years ago.
And as for the idea that link-loggers all want to be well-known for being smart or valuable “curators”? It is wildly and embarrassingly egotistical. Indeed, just as transparent as the martini-swilling know-it-all at a cocktail party. And no better, either. But it’s unfair to pin it all on Jason Kottke - there are tens of thousands of them out there worse than he is, both not-as-useful and exponentially more egotistical.
Ok, my final thoughts before this gets tl;dr. Brian: if you want to write back, I concede the last word to you. ;-)
We’re probably in agreement about the general state of party conversation although to me, that’s been a problem with parties long before we entered blogdom. Back then it was people who only read Times’ Bestsellers. Now it’s people who only read Gawker. Shallow is as shallow does.
Linkbloggers serve as gateways for audiences who don’t have the time to troll the web. After finding something of interest, it is up to individual audience members to drill down for themselves. In this sense, linkbloggers serve a different purpose than the creators of ‘original’ content. Their output and impact isn’t necessarily comparable. It would be rude of me to make the argument that Oprah (a gateway) is either more or less valuable than the guests (‘original’ creators) on her show.
Irony Part I: it was a party conversation with Jason Kottke years ago that led me to read the works of Richard Dawkins which deepened my interest in memes as part of cultural dissemination. Years later, this would turn into the web series Know Your Meme, an in-dpeth look at the very shallow.
Irony Part II: We’re having this argument inside of Tumblr, a service that essentially product-izes the linkblog process.
Source: ninety9
I co-founded 
