Often my students would link to things just because they were a brand they recognized – not because they had any inherent social value. And I see this a lot in the blogosphere too.

Whereas URL’s in a microblogging community have a social value. They are social objects rather than footnotes. (Because there is no space for footnotes).

I sometimes wonder why TinyURL/snurl/whoever hasn’t used their data to give us indices of the most social URLs that day, etc. It’s the kind of thing O’Reilly has been looking for for ages.

alternately you could add tags to your posting mechanism, and keep them only in the links rss feed.

Figuring out tags might be tricky, but the content of the entry (and its permalink) could be put in the “Note” field.

Adding options would also be difficult – it’s easier just to auto-add everything.