"I asked Steve in a follow-up email: 'What criteria do you use to include an item when you're scanning all your sources? i.e. how do you decide what's important? What makes something jump out at you?'"
I usually link to what I find interesting. I read quite a lot of blogs, and well, anything that is interesting, or something I might want to refer to later on gets posted on my blog. Sometimes I have some links that are related to what I am working on. Mostly its links that I come across in my aggregator. I started blogging because I wanted a way to keep track of articles I read, and because I wanted to improve my writing.
