I don’t know if it’s just me or if things have started to change recently, for me it looks like more and more people spend their time just repeating information that other have created instead of adding some information of their own.

I’ll explain: I subscribe to a fairly large number of feeds, follow people on twitter (both using the follow function and through feeds), have a friendfeed account etc. Why? Simply because I’m an information junkie and it’s so much easier to consume than to produce — but even I am starting to get fed up with this. The reason is simply that a large part of the info I see is something that I’ve seen 1-2-3-4 times before.

What happens is typically that some web company launches a new service that is in private beta but is “the next big thing”. Immediately some well known person writes a blog post with some information - perhaps even an early hands-on review - this is just fine … but then something interesting happens: others start blogging about this but doesn’t add any opinion just a link to the original post, then there are posts that links to the post that links to original, etc, etc. All without adding any information. And now when Twitter is becoming more and more popular it becomes even worse: there is a tweet that link to the original post, a retweet, a retweet of the retweet etc.

Especially sad to see is the tweets that have a link (which is shortened so you don’t really see where it links to) that links to a web page that just contains a link to the original … and a huge number of ads.

I’m not against linking or referring to other people content … but please add some information so it makes it worth reading your tweet/post — don’t just try to increase the number of hits.

If you just want to link to something consider using a service like digg, delicious instead.