Having done a fair bit of blogging in my time, here’s some observations from that part of the world.

If you are doing link-blogging with the help of a clipping service like delicious, the default behavior tends towards using the tag as the link text. By default, I mean lazy – there are lots of ways to bookmark a page that let you quickly stuff in a link. That points to the need for link-friendly title tags.

The other path towards link-blogging is to totally rewrite the title copy – Jorn Barger’s influential Robot Wisdom handles things that way. In his case he has link-text of the site, not the title text, so that will tend to influence link weight of sites with good names. see e.g.

http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/

Typically, if you are linking from a person’s name, the kinds of blog-based comment tools will connect name + web site. This is one way that bloggers end up with a lot of very natural links to their own name to their blog, via comments or inline references.

A well designed wiki like Wikipedia or Arborwiki will have a name space that is super easy to guess the right name in, and thus will be easy for someone generating a link on the fly to type in the correct URL without looking it up. You can chalk up a lot of Wikipedia links to laziness, and a well-designed and comprehensive wiki architecture will bend over backwards to make it easy to link to (including fixing variant spellings with aliases).

Bloggers will also often link back to each other’s postings with some kind of very simple shorthand text, in cases where they want to make a lot of links but don’t want to have the page text be huge. Look at the phrase “More than 1000 of you got fired today.” on

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/2/charlie_o_donnell_to_fired_yahoos__come_work_here_

That’s implemented as eight (8!) links in less than one line. That’s extreme, but not too atypical when discussion is fast and furious.