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I really can’t think of a variation on the “Lauren-Blogroll” joke I haven’t already done
Well, while I was thinking about other things, most of them having to do with me and the importance of my feelings to myself, a little thing called “Blogroll Amnesty Day” came and went.
Atrios declared it, Kos jumped on board, and a couple other prominent bloggers did as well. The idea being that they’d revamp their blogrolls on BAD (come up with a better acronym next time, fellas) to clean out the stuff they weren’t reading, theoretically opening up space on their rolls for new, less-well-known blogs. Some of them as were dropped felt hurt, and others took it in stride but pointed out that their traffic didn’t benefit from the change, which hurts if you rely on traffic to help — in the ugly phrase of the year — monetize your blogging.
And did a new crop of bloggers reap the reward? Dunno. Kos is explicitly focusing on electoral blogs. Atrios seems to have contracted his blogroll, and I say that knowing full well and gratefully that I could be described as being at the very top of his blogroll due to my secret identity as a Pandagon co-blogger.
Aside from that, how did BAD affect me? Apparently not at all, at least in any direct way. The one major blogger who’d both participated in BAD and had previously linked me here at Creek Running North is PZ, and he used the occasion to ask for suggestions of new blogs to list, which is as it should be. I made the cut, probably because PZ liked Zeke. I think I picked up a link from My Left Wing during that same week, or at least that’s when I first noticed it.
Lauren points to a good post at Republic of T in which Terrance analyzes the politics of the matter quite well. He’s dispassionate — I think he’s tired — and he’s done some writing on the subject before, so follow his breadcrumbs from that link if you’re interested. Elevator version:
Gone are the days of someone starting a blog on a whim, only to suddenly find themselves among the top ranked. You either have to have the PR muscle of a corporate entity behind you, or the cache of an already established celebrity like Arianna Huffington (with a bevy of celebrity friends to help keep the content flowing and the readers coming to see what those famous names have to say.)
There is perhaps one other path out of blog oblivion; there’s the possibility that you’ll be favored by a blogger further up the curve and, if they link to you often enough, find yourself finally “one of them.”
Of course, as Terrance points out, there is a converse freedom to be had here: if you don’t care about your traffic, you don’t need to care about who blogrolls you.
And I wonder whether the whole discussion is predicated on the assumption that there’s one blogging hierarchy, when in fact there are several. Making Light is way up in one, Twisty in another, Dave Winer in another.
I care and I don’t. I couldn’t ever climb anywhere near the top of the political blogging hierarchy even if I wanted to: I’m just too far to the left for such a thing to happen, and I keep mentioning pesky things like the history of US imperialism prior to 2002. Of course, that might keep me from becoming a leading dog blogger as well. That and not having a dog. I’d like my writing to reach a wider audience, and some of that there above-mentioned monetizationing would be nice, seeing as I am now without an income. But I recognize that predictability is a common denominator among most truly successful blogs, and this blog is not predictable. Some people run political blogs that occasionally veer into music or knitting or recipes. But I’ve got more feet planted firmly in genres than I have actual feet. This is a political blog. It’s a nature blog. It’s It was a dog blog. I write humor. I write inaccessible poetry. I seem to be getting into music criticism.
This is not supposed to be the way to blogging fame, I know. I’ve been lucky enough to get a link from Atrios and gained a few regular readers that way. Among big-league bloggers PZ and Michael B., and Amanda and Lauren/various of the Feministe people have regularly sent me boatloads of traffic.
But I look at my referral stats, and once you subtract out the 95 percent of my traffic that comes straight offa Google, the bulk of people who click over here come from blogs with far less traffic than the big folks. And all those links from less-trammeled blogs mean more Google traffic, too. Technorati, which misses a lot, says about 325 places link in to this domain. About a dozen of those are at big-traffic blogs, I’m thinking. Nineteen of them go to Ron’s joint. The rest of the links come from non-A-list, and probably non-B-list blogs. Whatever those terms are supposed to mean. I have no idea what they mean, myself. I’m just flinging them around. In fact, I have been referred to as an “A-Lister,” even before I started blogging at Pandagon.
It’s certainly a subjective assessment. I get a thousand visits on a good day these days. Lots more than most blogs, but far less than most you probably read. And yet I got one of these in the mail recently:
I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t know that I have the luxury, any longer, of playing the apathetic outsider sneering at the unimportance of blogrolls. I went to sleep one night being a person cruelly deprived of link juice, and woke up the next morning being the person benefiting from incoming links without giving nearly as much back. 325 links coming in and I’ve got about 58 going out from the blogroll. Is that fair?
I hate long blogrolls, though. This is the problem. I don’t usually use other people’s blogrolls to look for blogs I haven’t visited before. I’m far more likely to follow a link in the text of a post. And I’m far more likely to want to link to your blog in a post as well. My sense is that those links are more valuable. And my sense is that — when I can actually bring myself to write a post these days — I’m pretty free with those links.
But maybe I’m on crack. What do you folks think? How do you use blogrolls? Do you use blogrolls? Is this BAD an abrogation of community, or a petty feud?
Oh, and check out my blogroll. Lots of good folks there. Some you’ve heard of, some you haven’t.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
I’m not a heavy duty blog reader, but I would say that most of the other blogs I’ve linked to from yours were by clicking on the name of a commenter whose comments I found interesting and followed the links to their websites.
Next would most likely be the links in a post.
Last would be the blog roll. I don’t usually go to those unless I’m specifically searching for something new to read.
One of the things I like about your blog is its tendency to wander around many subjects.
I go to blogs less often for politics, more often for science, nature, and dogs. We subscribe to a couple of science magazines and I like the annual anthologies of nature and science writing as well.
Natalie
By: By Natalie on 2007 03 30
One of the things I like about your blog is its tendency to wander around many subjects.
Often in the same sentence!
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 03 30
Also a big fan of Loren Eisley, Lewis Thomas, and John McPhee. The first Loren Eisley I read was an essay about pigeons under the New York elevated train and a mouse in his houseplant and sense of place… I was hooked.
McPhee is certainly not as poetic as Eisley or you but I like the way he can take a simple subject and write a fascinating book about it, about oranges, for example. Plus I like all the geology topics.
By the way, can you suggest a good place to take an old dog with arthritis in the Clayton area? I’m going to have some time to kill there with our boy Chris end of next week. I know it’s near Mt. Diablo. He needs short walks only.
By: By Natalie on 2007 03 30
I love reading blogs. Found yours, I think, through
the journal, but I may have been looking for information on science and nature and frogs, or
maybe it was that politics thing.
Anyway, a “B”? No way. Your writing is up there
with the best of them.
I used the blogrolls at first, to find out what was out there.
By: By jeanie on 2007 03 30
I’m far more likely to follow a link in the text of a post. And I’m far more likely to want to link to your blog in a post as well. My sense is that those links are more valuable.
That is how I see it also. Plus, links within a post aren’t just what I prefer as a reader; they’re what I prefer to receive as a blogger. I would much rather be linked that way than be on a blogroll.
I don’t think many people use blogrolls anymore, especially not in these days of RSS, and very few bloggers benefit significantly, long-term, from being present on one.
I get 2-3 hits a day from Feministing’s blogroll. I appreciate it, but I also feel guilty, because I don’t need to be there. Some more dedicated, serving-it-up-daily style feminist blogger needs to be there, because that’s what a reader of a frequently updated site like Feministing is probably looking for—more news, less “I bought this horrible slipcover, wanna see?”
And I’m an ingrate, too, because I don’t value hits. I value readers, especially readers willing to comment. One of the things I enjoyed so much about receiving a link from Twisty is that she sent people who stuck around for more than 1 minute 24 seconds. She sent READERS. I’ve had links from bigger traffic sites that didn’t send me readers; they sent me clickers. There’s a huge difference. Clickers look around and either don’t find what they’re looking for and move on, or they don’t read what I wrote but feel compelled to leave me a comment explaining how much it sucks anyway. Clickers can suck my left tit.
That’s why I’m not keen on blogrolls. That, and things like “You link to a very bad person, so I’m not going to link you anymore.” The high school politics of blogrolls, that’s what I really hate.
Now then: Who’s this Atrios guy you keep going on about, huh? Should I have heard of him?
By: By ilyka on 2007 03 30
Sent you an email, N., but yes, Clayton is near Mount Diablo. Unfortunately, Mount Diablo has a somewhat restrictive policy re: dog walking on trails: they don’t allow it. I generally favor that for wildlife purposes, but it’s a shame for Chris because the Mitchell Canyon trail would be a wonderful Old Dog trail were Old Dogs allowed.
Morgan Territory is not exactly nearby, but not far, and it’s completely off-leash.
Actually, walking along Mitchell Canyon Road toward the Mount Diablo state park gate would be pretty nice, seems to me. It’s a mile and a half from the intersection with Clayton Road to the gate, and it’s about half leafy suburb and about half rolling green/brown open space. With a gravel quarry on one side, true, so walk on the east side of the road. You could park in the suburbs and walk in the open space.
Or you could try the dog park if he’s the sociable type, and i understand the other city parks allow dogs on leash.
The closest East Bay Regional Park other than Morgan Territory would be Black Diamond Mines; I haven’t been but Becky says there are old-dog hikes there.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 03 30
I hardly ever find blogs through blogrolls but I do maintain one. Why ? I feel like my blogroll is a public declaration of other bloggers I read and admire.
I find new blogs through recommendations of blogging friends and in posts and most often through carnivals that I follow or participate in.
I don’t care so much about hits (although I would like to make a little bit of dosh even if it’s just enough to pay for internet services) What I do care about is readers and keeping a good discussion going on the issues I cover.
It is a point of pride being on your blogroll and on blogrolls of other people I admire. That means much more to me than hits.
By: By deviousdiva on 2007 03 30
The only reason I’ve ever used a blog roll is where I’m looking for information on a specific topic: blogs about flying will tend to link to other blogs about flying. I’m much more likely to react to a link in the text. I found your blog by following a link in another blog which described a specific post of yours. I have no idea if you are on blogrolls or not but it wouldn’t have helped me find you.
:)
By: By sylvia on 2007 03 30
Hadn’t heard of of BAD before this. You’re on *my* blogroll. That’s the only way I would have heard of this. I don’t read any “A-list” blogs. I don’t have the time.
I’ve started to pare back my feeds just because I can’t keep up. I’m down to 300 right now. I need to cut back even more. Not all of them are blogs; some are news feeds and such.
I keep them in categories: news, Brooklyn, Humor, and so on. I only publish two categories on my blog: Gardening, and Nature, which is how I’ve categorized this blog. Those two categories combined comprise only about a third of the feeds. It’s more like a “what I’m reading now” kind of list. I’ve thought of adding my Brooklyn category. I like the idea of keeping the blogrolls on a separate page, just because right now they take up real estate in the sidebar. I don’t know the best way to do that with Blogger, other than keeping it as a separate post.
I’m a Z-list blogger. I’m more interested in the patterns of visits and navigation than raw numbers of readers. Do people seem to be finding what they’re looking for? Do they follow links to related content? Are they coming back?
While Google searches are the largest single category of incoming visits, it’s not even half the traffic. There are roughly 100 other referring sources, many/most of them other blogs. Some of those might be blogrolls. Some of them are from comments I’ve left on other blogs. Some of them are content links.
My blog has a very long tail. Only about a quarter of the page hits are for the home page, and it trails off sharply from there. Only a third of the traffic is for stuff I’ve written in the past month. The rest of it reaches back to the earliest posts. Specific posts remain relatively “popular”, months after I wrote them. This tells me I should keep writing good posts, not try to drive traffic to my site.
By: By Xris (Flatbush Gardener) on 2007 03 30
Thanks much for the ideas Chris!
Natalie
By: By Natalie on 2007 03 30
hi kids,
well, i can’t say i was pleased, but i was more righteously indignant than hurt, considering the history of my blogging career (i started the same time those other guys, including markos, and, to a lesser extent, duncan, did) and the actual real world changes my blog had participated in.
but, more to the point, and i have to keep going around correcting this misconception (so i guess my whining really does obfuscate the point), the purging of blogrolls hurts left blogtopia (and yes, i coined that phrase) in general.
if anyone is interested in the techie side of things, here’s a piece i wrote (and a follow up) explaining how blogroll purges destroys google search hierarchy ranking. that is to say, if i get dumped from kos and atrios, my chances of my blog showing up on a google search for any given story gets drastically reduced.
again, the use of “my” in the example misdirects the reader away from the problem which i’m having with the purges.
it’s all the lefty blogs in general who were dumped that now will not show up on a random google search.
ergo, the left side of any issue gets drastically under-represented in any random google search.
ask yourselves this: why do all the right blogs, big and small, have huge, all-inclusive rolls, and why does the right have such a competent well-oiled meme reproduction infrastructure? could they be related?
ok, i admit, i’m feeling left out because the big box blogs have decided that many of us who work hard at analysis and punditry as well as actual investigation and action alerts are suddenly not invited to the table any more.
even worse, i maintain it’s incredibly hypocritical of markos to have made his reputation as an important blogger on the backs of the “little people can take back their government by participation” meme, and then turn his back on the little people. what is he, huey long with a blog?
anyway, i hope that explains my position a little better. it’s not so personal for me (well, ok, it is) but it reflects a disconnect on a higher level for all of the left side of blogtopia and yes, i coined that phrase, that i don’t think we either need at this juncture in history, or actually reflects the supposed basic tennents of a liberal philosophy.
but what do i know, i’m just a guy w/a blog.
ps two things: pz myers didn’t participate in blogroll amnesty day, at least not in the way the others did. pz in fact will link to anybody who asks. i don’t have a link to his post saying so, but if you write him i bet he will accomodate you.
i, on the other hand, will link to any blog that links to skippy. i got yer amnesty day right here.
By: By skippy on 2007 03 30
Thanks for the clarification, skippy: I knew that’s what you meant but I may well have expressed myself unclearly here.
In any event, I agree 100 percent with yer criticism of the big box blogs. The current FDL Griles coverage, in which FDL commenters had to fulfill the blog’‘s moral obligation of at least mentioning Wampum as the go-to for Griles stuff, is a case in point.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 03 30
The high school politics of blogrolls, that’s what I really hate.
bang. i don’t even hate it. i just find it boring as hell.
By: By Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez on 2007 03 30
ps chris, i could have sworn i had creek running north on my roll, and i am sure i did, but i guess it fell off on one of my spring cleaning/template transfers. i apologize.
i will put crn back on, and i believe i will put it under “science blogs” which is a shorter, and more exclusive category than general “politcal blogs.”
again, my apologies.
By: By skippy on 2007 03 30
I don’t use blogrolls unless I want to read X and have forgotten to bookmark it. Then I go over to a blog that I suspect has it on it’s rolls and jump on over.
But skippy’s analysis is on the money. This purging pushes the smaller left blogs out to the periphery of the conversations in left-blogtopia, deliberately (?) setting the boundaries for important/not-so-important, relevant/not-so-relevant. It’s an exercise of power and weakens our side of the discourse.
But why do I complain? It’s not like I read Kos these days.
By: By Renee Perry on 2007 03 30
What was most surprising to me when I first wrote about Blogroll Amnesty Day was how everyone in the liberal blogosphere seemed to think it was such a great idea to kick blogs off their blogrolls and narrow them down to a select few. No one objected until skippy and I wrote about it and noted the elitism and Orwellian irony of the whole enterprise. Even now there are many who see nothing wrong with Atrios writing posts like “Why Your Blog Sucks.” Anyone who finds such posts insulting is dubbed by the Atriots to be a whiner.
I have had a “liberal” blogrolling policy—that is, I will link to anyone who links to me—for quite a while. I thought it was the polite thing to do to link to blogs that linked to me and I thought it would be mutually beneficial. I also thought it was ironic that most major liberal blogs had a very conservative and elitist blogrolling policy, while conservatives are much more likely to have long blogrolls with many smaller blogs.
As I explained in my original piece, as a practical matter the more links someone has the higher they come up in search engines. So liberal blogs are hurting themselves and others when they don’t link to each other. But blogrolls also create a sense of community. When a big blog links to a small blog they are saying that they consider that blog to be a part of the community. The fact that many major liberal blogrolls only include a select few, which often leaves out bloggers of color, feminist blogs, gay blogs and more specialized blogs in favor of the usual suspects reinforces the idea that certain blogs are not part of the elite and are not valued members of the community. It seems to go against all the rhetoric about inclusion that liberals are supposed to believe in and creates an inpenetrable blog class system. How odd that a conservative blogger like myself should have a more diverse blogroll than many liberals.
By the way, I realize that I didn’t have Creek Running North on my blogroll even though I am a frequent visitor so I have rectified that oversight. I hope that you will decide to expand your blogroll and that at some point you will find my modest blog worthy of inclusion. Whether you do or not, it is an honor to have you as a member of my motley community.
By: By Jon Swift on 2007 03 30
I don’t think blogrolls are supposed to be used to help find blogs. I’ve *never* clicked on a link in someone else’s blogroll.
I use my own blogroll to find blogs that I want to read, but I also put the ones in there that I want to help get more traffic via google (that said, I may want to remove a couple of the crazies from my blogroll…).
By: By factician on 2007 03 30
No apologies necessary, skippy. Thanks for adding me to the roll, and you too Mr. Swift.
I am rethinking my blogroll strategy based on the excellent points re: google juice.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 03 30
I think you’re just describing the dynamics of the “Long Tail” phenomenon, in almost precisely the terms in which Clay Shirky popularized that phrase.
If you have wide exposure, you simply cannot blogroll as many people as blogroll you. There may be a small number of blogs that get most of your personal traffic, and there will be a small number of those who blogroll you who send you a lot of incoming traffic - but the bulk of your traffic will come in sparse clumps from people who are interested enough to blogroll you but who only click through occasionally. Those are the “long tail” of your traffic source/volume distribution.
In deciding how to set up your own blogroll, you have a couple of obvious choices: you can blogroll the ones you’re particularly interested in, to highlight them, or you can blogroll the ones who send you the most traffic, to reward them. But it’s hardly possible, and hardly makes sense, to blogroll every blog in your long tail - you don’t have room, and, even though it’s a compliment to be blogrolled by them, there isn’t really enough traffic going in either direction to get excited about. So I think widely-read blogs inherently wind up with a seemingly exclusive blogroll - it contains far fewer listed blogs than they have incoming links, no matter what their criterion for inclusion is, simply because it has to.
I don’t think that’s bad. It would help if people would desist in taking it personally (checking for reciprocal blogrolling is like looking up your name in the index of a colleague’s book, and equally childish). But either way, it’s a natural result of the asymmetry between outgoing links (usually to “must-read” blogs) and incoming links (potentially from any blog that likes you). If you’re a “must-read” blogger (and you, Chris, are) you’re going to get lots of links, and if you’re a run-of-the-mill blogger you’re not going to be getting many; this means that must-read bloggers get links from bloggers who don’t “deserve” (as it were) links in return - and the blogrolls of both bloggers will reflect that.
By: By Kevin T. Keith on 2007 03 30
Speaking strictly as a “series of tubes” consumer, not publisher:
Blogs? Blogrolls? Is that a new kind of fusion sushi?
I read you, and PZ. Sometimes I follow a link in one of your posts. And, I’ll read the blog of an author I like who says he has one - like this one. I think I got to you originally by a Google search for Earth Island. Don’t think I’ve ever looked at your blogroll. I’m pretty much stuck in the old world of print media, when I can be. I don’t follow blogwars at all. I prefer the real world, which you write about eloquently. That makes me want to go outside. Looks like a nice day out. TGIF! Time to go for a hike.
By: By Fred Levitan on 2007 03 30
I use my blogroll the way most folks use bookmarks; to have a handy place to keep the links for the blogs I read regularly. Blogger’s recent rebuild broke my RSS feed and archives, and I’m patiently waiting for that to get sorted out. Once it does I’m going to prune the blogs I rarely read, and add some new ones. (I’m also going to start regular updates again this week, regardless of whether or not the feed is still nonfunctional, but that’s a different story)
By: By the_bone on 2007 03 30
Wampum has never been, and never will be on Markos’ BR because MB’s tasked him about the male/female ratio of his frontpagers. Plus, his take on Indians, particularly Vermont Abenakis during Howard Dean’s campaign was “they are expendable, and Indians don’t vote and don’t have money anyway”. That’s when we stopped trying to convince and started trying to affect. We made The Note twice on that work. Trippi’s since come around. Anyway, Markos makes quite a bit of money from the orange site.
Wampum isn’t on FDL’s BR because Jane accused Wampum of discriminating against her on the basis of gender and ethnicity in last year’s Koufax. Like we discriminate against Cherokee women. Ha! I dropped FDL because “sandpapper snatch” and more of the same simply isn’t political writing. Its something else.
But that isn’t all there is to some of the BRPurge, there’s the fact that the link-to universe for reporting and analysis by the coordinated-by-email bloggers who share an ad network revenue stream has shrunk and is more self-similar then two years ago.
I agree with SKIPPY, but I really don’t care about Google ranking. I care about writing and writers, and I’m reconciled to the fact that the A-Listers are in this for ranking, rather than writing, and read the MSM more closely than they read blogs.
Would it kill you to make the comment box 80x20 or something less _constrictive_?
By: By ebw on 2007 03 30
Would it kill you to make the comment box 80x20 or something less _constrictive_?
Why yes, in fact: it would, quite literally, kill me.
Fortunately, hell has wi-fi, so I’ve posthumously made the comment box twice as deep as it was. Good call, given the general willingness to write of the average commenter here. I think the original creator of this template was designing for a median somewhere around “M33 T00!” in length.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 03 30
I think the original creator of this template was designing for a median somewhere around “M33 T00!� in length.
eye 4GR33!!!
By: By JP Stormcrow on 2007 03 30
It bugs me when blogrolls aren’t alphabetized. That’s all I have to say about blogrolls.
By: By Lesley on 2007 03 30
you know what bugs me about alphabetized blogrolls? when people put blogs which start with the word “the” under “t.”
the bugs me.
By: By skippy on 2007 03 30
Oh, and by the way, I still think of this as a dog blog. The spirit of dog lives on.
When I drop in I think of Zeke, I visualize Zeke, I remember Zeke, my heart skips a beat for Zeke.
Your writing leaves deep and lasting impressions.
By: By Lesley on 2007 03 30
I just discovered this thru Skippy’s say hello feature, which i love (i must read you at Pandagon without realizing tho). I always click thru blogrolls and use them to discover new sites/voices—I find it’s great for getting off the beaten track.
I would say tho, that knowing that one blogger is great at gender/sexuality and another is great at wonky policy stuff, and another is great at media, etc, is easy—many of us jump to the known “expert” depending on the topic, which i think hurts more eclectic bloggers. But then again, they’re known qualities and rarely surprising.
By: By amberglow on 2007 03 31
When I first discovered blogs, I used to click blogrolls all the time to find new sites…
Now, not so much. I do look to see who people have on their blogrolls to see who they like to read (or give a link to), because it can tell you a lot about that blogger…
I use mine to list sites that I like to read, and to give some link love. I like Skippy’s take on the whole purge thing, and wish the bigger lefty blogs would give more blogroll link love to the left side like the righties do.
By: By Marked Hoosier on 2007 03 31
Until reading Lauren’s posts sending me to here and The Republic of T, I never knew there was a “politics of blogrolls” to speak of. Strange. I thought most people just put in their blogrolls the other blogs they read on a semi-regular basis and liked ....
By: By elyzabethe on 2007 04 01
Hehe, it’s cute to read all you grizzled blog veterans declaring through cigar-smoke that blogrolls are for silly amateurs with no Hatori Hanzo swords…“too sexy for this blogroll”...
By: By Kai on 2007 04 01
I guess I’m one of the few weirdos on the internet who actually does surf other people’s blogrolls, especially if it’s someone I like to read. Their interests will be similar to mine. The other way I find good blogs is by clicking on people’s profiles or blog link in their comment. So commenting does count for something if you want people to visit your blog, but not if you just say, “I like what you wrote. Please visit my blog!” That just turns me right off. I don’t think that links in the posts count for as much. I think Ilyka hit the nail on the head there, you’re more likely to get “clickers”. They read the one post they were sent there for and they are off, at least that’s what I do.
By: By Donna on 2007 04 02
A couple of vaguely related points, with apologies if they have been made above - I skimmed the related posts and comments but did not read them all carefully:
1. Most of the people I talk to about blogging use feeds rather than blogrolls to direct their reading, and they think blogrolls will be phased out soon. Maybe feeds will be reconfigured and publicized more like blogrolls if there is a demand by readers to know which blogs “support” which other blogs; that is so far unclear.
2. People who use big blogs, blogrolls and linking primarily to have and exert power over others have internalized MSM values, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
3. You are an incredibly talented writer and there are a number of ways you can make money from your writing but they all involve compromises. I actually think you could make some of these compromises without undermining your voice or your values in any important way, but your views on this are alot more important than mine.
Warmest regards.
By: By Ann Bartow on 2007 04 02
But I recognize that predictability is a common denominator among most truly successful blogs, and this blog is not predictable.
Now, gee, why does that sound familiar? ;)
Blogrolls… I used to like having them on my blog, back in the day, and even went so far as to have several different ones, according to the types of sites they listed. But then I started realizing that there were a lot of ones on the personal side (versus the useful resources side) that had either gone dead, or I’d gotten out of the habit of reading that person’s blog, or whatever, and then I was faced with the question of who the roll was for - was it for me? Was it for my readers? Was it a way to connect with those bloggers on the roll? The problem was that, no matter how I answered it, someone’s feelings were going to get hurt if I took blogs off - or didn’t put new ones on - and yet there was no way I could keep adding them, and taking the time to keep it neatly up to date was not time I had… so I’ve taken it off, although it’s still unofficially present in my Typepad account. No one’s complained - though that may also be because no one’s visiting much anymore, either.
By: By Rana on 2007 04 02
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