For the past couple weeks I’ve been doing a lot of my writing on Writely, a free Web-based word processor that works entirely within a browser. It’s remarkably fast and is compatible both importing and exporting to Word. A few other pluses are that it saves drafts of each document so you can go back and view changes, it allows real time collaboration with others, and it offers direct publishing to many blog services (I haven’t tried that part out yet). Give it a try if you want to migrate one step further away from Microsoft.

Links are said to be the currency of the blogosphere. Throwing social bookmarking into the mix could dramatically alter what kinds of posts earn payment. Should we be worried?

One of the things I find most useful about my new weblog format is the plugin that displays my most recent del.icio.us links in the right sidebar. It works automatically and serves as a pretty effortless way to keep fresh material on the site even when I’m not writing, hopefully giving regular readers a reason to come back when I’m not on a good posting schedule.

(Quick primer for the non-geeks in the audience: del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. Users bookmark pages they find interesting and tag them with descriptive words. This creates new ways of finding useful content on the Web: you can follow the links of one particular bookmarker, check out the most popular links, or track certain tags. I subscribe via RSS to all bookmarks tagged with “espresso,” “libertarianism,” and a few other words. A lot of garbage comes in but a quick scan each day usually reveals a few sites I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.)

Social bookmarking is an alternative to blogging as a way of sharing information. Blogging has the benefit of adding a personal touch but groups links coarsely by the varied interests of the blogger and a few, perhaps poorly defined, post categories. Social bookmarking is impersonal and unedited but groups links precisely and flexibly by tags. Both methods have their advantages but social bookmarking seems like it may be the most efficient way to share links when no additional commentary is necessary or desired.

Blogging and social bookmarking aren’t only competitors. They complement each other very well and perhaps are at the their best when combined. Integrating one’s del.icio.us links into the sidebar essentially creates a mini-blog, freeing up space on the main page. This means that the blog entries with original content or that generate discussion in the comments section will stay at the top of the page longer, while the entries that would just be saying, “Hey, go look over here,” are relegated to a less prominent part of the blog.

Though I’m obviously a fan of combining social bookmarking and blogging, there is one aspect of it that has given me pause. If this becomes a popular thing to do, it will change the linking ethic of the blogosphere. The evolved norm is for a blogger to give credit to the source where she initially found a site she’s linking to with a “via” or a ” hat tip” acknowledgement. This is a small thing but it can make a big difference in establishing an unknown blog as one worth watching. I know that a few hat tips around the libertarian blogosphere were helpful in raising my site from total obscurity to the state of slightly less obscurity it currently enjoys. For example, sometime in my first year I linked to an unintentionally funny newspaper headline that got picked up by Radley Balko and Jim Henley, both of whom linked back to me. I added absolutely nothing of value to the link, but the hat tip ethic brought me traffic from two blogs far more popular than my own. If they had instead been using a del.icio.us mini-blog for sharing amusing links like that, I wouldn’t have gotten those hat tips becaure there’s no place for acknowledgment there.

If integrating social bookmarking with blogging becomes common, I can see two main effects. The first is that entries that simply link to some place else with no value added will become much less useful for generating traffic. Other bloggers may pick up the link, but they’ll just add it to their del.icio.us sidebars. The days of easy hat tips will vanish and start-up bloggers will find it harder to establish their sites in that manner.

The second effect is that getting recognized for original content will become far easier. Bookmarking a page on del.icio.us takes just a few seconds and plugins display it automatically in a blogger’s sidebar. I’ve personally found that this has led me to link in my sidebar to lots of good entries from other weblogs I read; I was not linking to nearly as many when I could only do so by writing a new post of my own.

In short, integrating blogging and social bookmarking will decrease the benefits of writing posts that link somewhere with no value added while decreasing the costs of others linking to truly interesting pages. The result should be that good original content will be increasingly rewarded and proliferate more easily around the blogosphere. In answer to my own doubts, then, we shouldn’t be worried. The hat tip ethic is imperfect anyway since no one follows the chain back more than one or two sources, and the net effect will be positive for creativity, sound analysis, and good writing. So sign up for del.icio.us, make space on your sidebar for your links, and start bookmarking.

[Update 10/21/05: Djoeke van de Klomp of Blinklist informed me of this brief survey asking users what they think would make social bookmarking better. If you're a bookmarker with an idea, your input is welcome.]