E-mail can be a dangerous thing. You get a newsletter or board post, you find an article online, then you send it to your team/company/etc. ("hey guys, here is an authentication article -- can we learn from this?"). Maybe the link pertains to an ongoing project, an area that your group was interested in, but maybe it don't. How useful is asynchronous research or research for other people? Should you try to catalog useful info for the future to save time, or is this just a waste of time?
At Port80, we crave these types of links:
1. A very intensive look at Windows and/or IIS internals, such as you would get in a (very good, not an average) book or course
2. Exactly the right piece of information we happen to be looking for to solve very specific coding or administration problem we happen to be struggling with – at a specific point in the space time continuum.
General overview articles on server administration subjects will very rarely be of any use in the first case -- too superficial to contribute to fundamental learning (and intended to be such). Such top 10 lists or “Intro to X” articles lack the detailed examples, tutorials, labs, etc. that are the
sine qua non of such learning. Some are really good, and if you find a great article on X with graphs and useful stuff – usually very long – keep it. Such “ultralinks” are worth the human brain indexing effort because they will be reused somewhat frequently.
In the second sort of case, where what is needed is a quick, pragmatic solution to a particular problem, a particular article, hit on at just the right moment, sometimes might be useful. But here
the problem is freshness: There are simply too many such articles (and there is too much duplication) to make it worthwhile trying to keep up with them as they are published. When that burning issue comes up, having seen an article on it in the past is rarely helpful. Even when we have bookmarked some article six months earlier, thinking it might be useful later on, we almost never find it by searching through our bookmarks and trying to recall the title -- Google is much faster and more direct.
So, what is the moral of this story? Links are great to e-mail, but make sure it is an ultralink if you want someone to keep it or else make sure someone needs that link now before bothering them with it and spending the time to send it. We have one guy at Port80 who forwards every friggin’ IIS link he can find – our largest internal spammer. While he does not get the ire that a free cialis email generates in his fellow Port80 email users, he would do better to read this post: Research for research’s sake ain’t research, and the best link is the one that gives you the right information when you need it.
Save time, let the search engines do the indexing.