Sharing links around and how things have changed.......
Sometimes you just cant win...... Parableman has vigourously defended Christian bloggers against the charge that we are deceiving the Ecosystem. His reasoning is clear- there is no doubt whatsoever that nothing that we are doing is against either the spirit or the letter of the ecosystems guidelines. The fact that the TLB actually hosts the alliance blogrolls (only one of which is the Blogdom of God) and provides the code for people to include them in their site should be a clue. He thinks that long blogrolls are fine and should contribute to the link score equally to short ones. Links Traffic Hits per link 40931 41850 1.02245242 Axis of Naughty 5762 36832 6.392224922 Liberal coalition 3290 6183 1.879331307 Blogdom of God 25961 98349 3.788336351
Ironically, one of the reasons that I had for forging the Blogdom of God in the first place was that it seemed at the time that Christian blogs were getting more traffic than links and not sharing their traffic around. It seems that the only reason that the criticisms being raised now are even possible tto contemplate is that as a group we have now become very good at including links to one anothers blogs. Is that such a bad thing?
If there are blogs like mine that have more links than traffic is that such a bad thing? We potentially share the traffic we do have with others by every link we give. The fact that I am quite proliffic in my linking out to others means that not surprisingly others link to me. I am fine with this, and its all out in the open and not at all underhand. I want the entire Christian Blogosphere to be more accessible and easier to move around and find the things you want to read. Aggregators and Blogrolls help us do that. The fact they also help ecosystem rankings is almost a bonus- if somehow us putting our posts on the same page and demonstrating thereby that we are more interested in helping our christian brothers succeed in blogging than ourselves was shown to hinder our ecosystem rankings is there anyone out there who would say "lets stop showing that we can be more together than we are apart"? I dont think so. Our linking to one another is a product of our love for one another and should only increase as time goes on not decrease.
Actually the fact is that as a group we do not have many more links per sitemeter hits than other groups at TLB. Here is a calculation that I did earlier omitting Instapundit since it is only one site and not a group of blogs. You will see from this that we are actually in the midpoint of the range of number of hits per link seen in the different alliances. This analysis would suggest that we are still not as generous with our links as say the Alliance of Free Blogs is. Does anyone accuse them of atificially inflating their links rankings?
Christians rightly and appropriately differ in how liberal they want to be with their linking stategy. Some blogs (especially less prominent more personal ones) see each link as an endorsement of a site's content. They are nervous about sending their traffic to a site that they are not 100% sure will help their readers. Guess what, I have absolutely no problem with such an approach and to be honest I love looking at people's blogs which have such short lists on them to see who I find on the list that I havent heard of before. If I like a blog, and if I like the majority of blogs that I have heard of that they link to, you can bet that theres a good chance I will follow a link that appears in a short blogroll on their sidebar to see what I might have been missing. I am fairly sure thats how I found jollyblogger in the first place.
Other blogs are totally indescriminate and will list any referrer or linker back to them, as well as incorporating not one but several externally generated blogrolls. That is absolutely fine as well. No one forced either person to include the blogs they have in their link list.
Other blogs like my own take a middle ground and list their favorite blogs first or perhaps include a short list from elsewhere such as the decablog. Then, they include much longer lists. The message is clear, here are the blogs I really like and then here are a bunch of others you might be interested in.
Just for your interest I include an extract from an old post that was one of the first I ever wrote on the Blogdom of God back in December 2003. You will see that reading between the lines the main reason I set this whole thing up to be honest was that I couldnt work out how to use any other feed reading software and I figured that people might enjoy reading Christian blogs on one page. There really isnt much more to it than that!
Sory this post turned out to be so long!
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What if a few great Christian blogs got together and determined that they would regularly link to each other. Not to fix the results of blog searches, but to highlight excelent quality blogging from throughout the Blogdom of God. What if these core blogs all agreed to post a set of links like the one in this post with suggested additions on their own blogs- a kind of Christian Blogdom hall of fame. What if we worked together to support one another and encourage great blogging. What if all these blogs were all available in the Blogdom of God meaning that blogging a new entry that takes your fancy just took a second or two and you could keep up with all these blogs really easily.
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