Marco.org

I really, really don’t care which office or restaurant you’re sitting in and checking into Foursquare from.

It’s important to balance the abundance of cheap, widespread internet publishing with appropriate considerations for your intended audience. If you’re trying to be interesting to anyone beyond… yourself, you have to consider whether anyone else in the world will benefit from spending a tiny slice of their time learning where you’re having coffee or holding a meeting.

This isn’t to say that such posts can’t contain other value. On the contrary, many of my favorite internet writers (like meaghano) write amusing, insightful, or touching stories around the trivial task of getting coffee. But when you tell Foursquare or Brightkite to automatically publish your location to Tumblr or Twitter, that’s not adding any value.

If your location isn’t interesting enough for you to manually write a post about it for some reason, why should your audience spend their time reading about it?