Marshall Kirkpatrick asks whether sending your own stuff to del.icio.us, furl or similar makes you a spammer:

"Do you think that tagging your own blog posts into social bookmarking databases is a form of spam? I don’t.... People do ask me all the time, is it OK to bookmark my own blog posts? I think it is, and here are a couple my thoughts on the subject:
*if services like Furl and del.icio.us are collaborative databases, why wait until someone else submits my posts to the database? Doesn’t it sound like a good idea to make the post as findable as possible?"

Makes sense to me. Go read the whole list.

Two points for my additional 10c:

1. We're only bookmarking, not republishing in multiple places, submitting multiple times or e-mailing to multiple people, & there's no automation involved. There's no more chance that one of my self-posted links will get read / rebookmarked / commented upon than there is of the next link being picked up.

2. From my perspective, the additional exposure on del.icio.us is great, but I'm much more interested in the post-sorting / categorising features that enable me to use the service to stand-in for categories. I'm using the service in a way that is different from the original intent, but there is no malicious intent or negative outcome.

Minor & incidental self-promotion, perhaps. Spam? No.

Filed in: del.icio.us, blogtech, spam