Blogrolling, rolling, rolling, keep them blogs a-rolling
Blog Roll How To (howto) at Greg Laden’s Blog.
What does a blog roll do for the blogger? Well, it allows the blogger a way to give and receive link love. Link love is not a form of on line cybersex. It is in part a replacement for one on one professional contact that occurs in Meatland. Entry on a blog roll is a nice thing to do for someone else. If a blog roll is very short, you are either looking at a new blogger or an asshole. (I’m talking about the total length of blog roll, not the displayed portion). I know of several bloggers who have been blogging for quite some time but have fewer than 40 or so sites on the blog roll, three or four of them being links to the blogger’s own sites. Independent evidence suggests in many of thes cases that the blogger is an asshole. The correlation is astoundingly strong.
There are plenty of exceptions, of course. If you are reading this, you are an exception, I assume.
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Most blog ranking services can easily detect and thus devalue links in blog rolls or blog rolling posts, but the truth is that if I put a link to your blog on my site, you get an increase in techorati ratings (and other ratings) …. and visa versa …. even if the link is in a blog rolling post. The ranking sites may devalue (depending) such links, but these links are not meaningless, so I assume that as ranking sites evolve over time, this is recognized for what it is.(By the way, many bloggers claim that ranking is not important to them at all. Those would be the bloggers with low ranks.)
Linking posts you like or blogrolling blogs you read on any kind of regular basis is win-win, if people return the favor. To quote Chekov (Pavel, not Anton) “. . . and we all move up one step in rank.”
With all this in mind, it’s time to update physics-y blogs I’ve been visiting on occasion that somehow had not been added yet.
Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat
sciencegeekgirl
The Mind of Dr. Pion
Cosmic Variance
Asymptotia
I think my short blogroll falls under the “new blogger” exception, but I do think it’s probably not necessarily helpful to have one of the 200+ long lists that I occasionally see. I imagine diminishing returns quickly become a factor. Linking to other people’s interesting work directly in posts is of course another story.
Matt,
It’s a pain to maintain long lists of arbitrary links. In my case I’m just manually pulling the science blogs I have in my feed reader, so there’s probably some way to automate it if enough time was sunk on it. Wish I had those extra hours 🙂
Thanks for the link!