The blogosphere’s “dirty little secret”
From A-list blogger Jason Kottke
This is one of those dirty little secrets of the blogosphere…the big blogs that extensively summarize/excerpt don’t drive that much traffic.
This all stems back to the art of linking. Many of the A-list blogs know that they can strategically include a link and provide a block-quote well within the realms of “fair use” and yet still provide little benefit to the content creator. There have been several times I have been linked on Technorati Top 100 blogs only to receive a handful of actual visitors.
I got linked from Romenesko once and saw more traffic from the from a backwoods message board that also linked.