A New Era for Linkposts

My blogs for EconLog

People sometimes tell me that they write blog posts primarily or entirely for their own benefit and learning, and that they are almost indifferent whether anybody actually reads them. Many technical blogs have this philosophy, as with Oliver Nash’s excellent blog.

This is how I think about my links roundups. They started off as a way to improve my retention and understanding of the cultural and academic material I was consuming.¹ They are ‘chips off the workbench’ of my other projects, and don’t take very much work above and beyond the work of reading and taking notes to begin with.

Nevertheless, people seem to really like them. I get more emails about the links than I do about anything else that I do. They inspire the occasional viral tweet. I have been told three linkpost series were inspired by mine, and I was recently profiled in the linkpost linkpost. Among the people who seem to like them are the folks who run EconLog, the group blog with Scott Sumner, Bryan Caplan, and Russ Roberts. Some years ago, I enjoyed getting into a multi-layer friendly internet beef with David Henderson at EconLog, about the sociology and economics of migration.

I have given EconLog permission to repost abridged versions of my links, and you can read the first one here. I understand it to be a kind of ‘director’s cut’ featuring the top third of my monthly recommendations most relevant to their readership. Here is my author page. I’m not ruling out writing other (non-link) blogs for them, but recently my philosophy has been to write about whatever I am most interested in, and then shop around for suitable outlets once pieces are nearing completion.

This, by the way, is why I skipped Links for September. This partnership benefits if the linkposts are released around the middle of the month, so that they can be edited and abridged within the same month. You have probably noticed that I was veering further away from that. To return without having posts of ridiculously uneven length would take some time; better, I thought, to just skip a month. Karina disagrees with this decision, and won’t stop bullying me about it.

Nothing will be changing on my blog, but for those of you who find me to be unreadably verbose, this should be good news. Maybe they’ll do Zvi Mowshowitz next. My sense is that EconLog is proudly from the old school era of blogging, and you can subscribe to their RSS feed here.

1. As with spaced repetition, there seem to be tradeoffs available in which spending x% longer on the reading process makes you understand it y% better, for y>>x.