btw, not that i want to be presumptuous – but let’s not forget that for decades, no-one paid attention to van gogh’s paintings.

Content sharing sites thrive because of the signal-to-noise ratio: high quality, low volume (compared to “the web at large”). As you point out, nobody has time to visit every page on the web. Social link sharing sites (Digg, Stumble, etc.) work because someone else’s effort (submitting a link) results in your being able to visit a subset of the web, presumably of hand-selected better-than-average quality.

So, of course you’d want to submit links to your own stuff, because, you know, it’s better-than-average, right?

WRONG. Of course your kid is the cutest. But, if other people think your kid is cute, maybe you’re on to something.

If everyone starts submitting links to their own stuff–intsead of someone else who also thinks your stuff is worth sharing with others–then these social link sharing sites’ signal-to-noise ratio will plummet and finding the worthwhile links amongst the crap will make them less useful and usable.

If you can’t find at least one or two people who think your content is worth submitting somewhere, then maybe you have to just accept that maybe it is, indeed, crap.

i’m a big SU favourite. if i see a stumbler who does nothing but stumble her or his own post, i get bored and don’t pay attention. but if it’s one of the things that show up, why not?

same thing with twitter. if someone mentions a post here and there and there’s lots of other tweets – why not? it’s natural.

when we get together over a coffee, we’ll naturally say, “hey, this is what i did yesterday”. and if we only talk about ourselves then we’ll probably not get many coffee dates …

simple, no?

Glad you like the direction I went, even if a bit different than yours. And yes, I’m very serious now about networking like I mean it. I want to really connect beyond just being faceless names.

Barbara – thanks for stopping by and commenting. I’m with both you and Kristen, I expect my contacts to share their best stuff with me. One can not keep up with hundreds of blogs, lets alone several hundred.

As my contacts grow, so does the wealth of great stuff being shared. So sorry if I miss anything great.

You have taken an added spin on my post and it is wonderful and I totally agree with you, network like you mean it.

As far as Twittering your blog posts, well…I love when the folks I follow Twitter a blog post, Sphinn post, or whatever. It makes it so much easier than weeding through my RSS. I think the big problem is when people are trying to follow as many people that they can in hopes of getting a return follow and then they get a bunch of self promotion tweets. That would be a pain. But if you are selective in who you follow then it should not matter if they notify you of a “new blog post”.

About folks giving a shout out on say Twitter, I’m not as negative about that. It really depends if the person just posts links or is actively engaged in the conversations, especially my conversation or not. If the only talk I ever see them do is post links, then I usually stop following them.

I must say though I click a fair amount of links on Twitter and really should find a tool that aggregates all of the links I miss. SOme of the best stuff I enjoy online is coming through Twitter.

Kathy, you’re right too. There are not good rules of thumb. Each person has to find what works best for them.

Would be cool to have a magic “pimp” button though. Send this sucker out to all social media sites, bling posts, and awesome cool dudes upon who’s words the community hangs.

Ahem. Yes. Great post. Great blog. Fed and Read.