There are two great posts on Techmeme right now about whether links are important or not.
I agree with Stan Schroeder’s Mashable post when he says:
“So, why do we still do it? Well, links are still the glue of the Internet. Without links, there’s no context:
Every week or so, I goto technorati and see who might be linking to this site. I want to see who agrees with me, disagrees with me or what else they have to say.
But my favorite way to check out incoming links is inside my Tumblr dashboard.
For example, here is one of my recent song of the day posts. In the upper right corner you can see how many times it was reblogged. And when you click on the number a list pops below called ‘notes’ that shows who reblogged it and if they added anything. You can also click on their name and visit their tumblelog as well.
I only screen grabbed 9 people because it would have been a large image to grab the whole thing but you get the idea.
David Karp has his tumblelog set up so you can see the reblog list & notes for a given post in all of his permalinks. Here’s an example. Damn cool.
I’m hoping to add that to my site very soon too!