On Self-Promotion

Yeah, quality speaks for itself, and people are generally good at identifying quality when they see it. The trick to promoting your product isn't to try and convince people of its high quality, but just to get people to look at the product and judge the quality for themselves.

Saying "I wrote an awesome program recently" when you've only written a decent program makes people think you are dishonest. Better is just to say "I wrote a program recently".

This is one of several ways to do self-promotion. Zeldman is one of those who curates projects and links to other sites. But for every curator, there are dozens of artists.

I work mainly in the data visualization realm, where sites like FlowingData and DataVisualization.ch act as curators. They have solid brands, sure, and everyone knows them, but there are so many other designers, artists, hackers, etc that form the base community from which those sites pull their content.

Zeldman is right that there are a lot of spammy linkrolls and Twitter feeds that simply link/retweet without adding additional value. Frankly, we could use less of those, and more people with original thoughts to add to the conversation. So I have to disagree with this point of Zeldman's article and say instead: curate if you must, but be sure you're adding value to the conversation.