It all started when Owen Strawn sent me a note asking why I didn't blogroll a certain well-known blogger. As sometimes happens to me, a minor inquiry provoked a storm of conflicting ideas in my head. Not emotional ones, just a mishmash of half-formed impressions.
Just before that, I'd gotten a note from a weblogger whose work I really liked. He'd started out strong, but then had gone dormant for a couple of months. I asked him why. He told me it was basically because the Instapundit was too dominant and if you weren't "in" with him you could never get a large audience. I didn't want to argue with him, but I was skeptical, since I had a steadily growing audience well before Instapundit noticed me. I knew that blogrolls were a big part of making that happen, although I couldn't quite say how.
Finally, a post by Mindles the other day on blogroll saturation made the ideas in my head gel. It was when he said this:
[My] blogroll is too big....I like having the whole list there for reading, but I realize it diminishes the value of each link to have 'em all there.
A voice in my head immediately said, "no, it doesn't."
Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, specifically his discussion of "gift economies," provided the glue that put it all together for me. Raymond seeks to explain how computer programmers could create amazingly powerful and reliable software products like Linux, Perl, and Apache for free, within a philosophical framework known "open-source." He describes the way open-source works as a "gift economy." A gift economy is one where people voluntarily exchange things of value, without any material compensation whatsoever.
As the the Institute for Technology and Enterprise says:
Economists have a very hard time understanding why anyone would give anything away; this blindness may contribute to the lack of attention that the corporate world paid to the open-source movement in its early days. Ghosh solves the paradox of the supply of open-source, reminding us that the concept of utility includes all things that matter to a person, including reputation, recognition and the possibility of future remuneration. He points out that open-source developers are recognized in the hacker community, that their reputation grows there with increasing levels of contribution, and that this recognition and reputation may one day create an opportunity for the contributing hacker to make an upward career move. Raymond addresses the same topic. Economics is the study of the movement of scarce goods and services; in an interview, Raymond was asked, "So the scarcity that you looked for was the scarcity of attention and reward?" His reply was, "That's exactly correct".If you haven't noticed by now, most of the blogosphere works on pretty much the same premise. Nobody's making much money doing this. So why do it? I suggest it will always be one of the following:
1) They enjoy the recognition they receive, in the same way that actors, comedians, and other entertainers do.I submit that every reason a weblogger has for blogging comes down to one or more of those. All involve some degree of wishing for readers. Some want readers more than others, some may even want less than they have. But all webloggers want readers--otherwise, we'd write private journals.2) They want to change something about themselves or the world around them.
3) They hope that it may lead to paying jobs as writers, or at least help them build marketable skills in that area.
So let's get it out in the open: bloggers want readers. We have to obtain them somehow. Money isn't an option, or isn't much of one. So, I submit that we "buy" readers from other webloggers in the gift economy.
---
Let me turn away from that provocative point for a moment, and note something about what webloggers offer their readers. We want your attention, and we get it by offering either knowledge or entertainment. It's that simple.
So then, what is a blogroll? Knowledge.
What knowledge? "Here's something I found interesting."
It's not a heavy endorsement. Maybe I worship it. Maybe it made me chuckle once. Maybe it taught me something. I'm not actually telling you much, just that somehow, I found it praiseworthy, and thought that you might too.
So let's look at two ways to do a blogroll: the Asparagirl way, or the Instapundit way.
Asparagirl lists a dozen or so weblogs she likes or finds interesting, right at the top of her page. She has presented us with a lovely cathedral into which she has placed a few of her very favorite things.
There's not a thing wrong with that. Her blog, her choice. Giving certain people a very strong endorsement is a very nice thing to do.
Instapundit, on the other hand, lists hundreds of weblogs, about which we can only know that, at some time, for some reason, he found something praiseworthy. He has given us a bazaar full of toys.
Now stop and think: no matter how big an Asparagirl fan you are (and I am definitely one of her fans), what are the odds that you will like everything that she likes? Furthermore, if you've already determined your opinions about her short list of favorites, how useful is it to you to click on her site every day, and see those same sites listed that you already know about?
I submit that, to most people, Instapundit is offering something more valuable: more chances that we'll find something delightful if we randomly scan through his blogroll. In no case will we know for sure unless we try, but Instapundit's given us lots more chances to win a great prize: a new site with stuff we really like!
Furthermore, Instapundit's given us something we may not be aware of: a contribution to our subconscious.
If I spot the same blog on Instapundit's site, on Michele Catalano's site, on Acid Man's site, on Megan McArdle's site, on Brad DeLong's site, on Ara Rubyan's site, what is that telling me? That it's the best site on the planet?
No. It's telling me that at least 6 people found at least something moderately interesting about the site. As I cruise around to various weblogs, if I keep seeing the same links on blogroll after blogroll, at some point it's going to pop into my conscious mind, and I'm going to wonder:
"Why do all these different people find this site interesting enough to link to?" Thus, I'll probably visit it sooner or later.
Short blogrolls offer me very little valuable knowledge. You've told me your handful of favorites, and if I visit you regularly, you're not offering me much I haven't seen already. But if 25 other weblogs list something, I see that 25 people have all found something praiseworthy, however minor, about a certain site. That means there are good odds that I'll find something praiseworthy too. No guarantees, mind you, but the odds are higher.
Venomous Kate once said that she would only put blogs on her blogroll that she read every day. I thought, "Why would you do that? Do you only subscribe to HBO if you can watch every show they offer?" My own wife doesn't read my site every day, for goodness sakes. But now I realize it goes much further than that: Kate's blogroll offers me the knowledge that she found something interesting. That's valuable to me.
But, would I rather shop at a bookstore where the manager has personally read every magazine he's put on his shelf? Or would I rather buy from a bookstore where the manager has perused the magazine market and found a varied but tasteful selection of reasonable-quality magazines, allowing me to decide what I like best from his selection?
In short: When you maintain a blogroll, you're trading in knowledge, and small numbers of strong endorsements are often less valuable, in toto, than large numbers of moderate endorsements. Because, in the end, your readers aren't going to like all your choices anyway. So why not offer a smorgasbord rather than a small menu?
---
Now, let me return to my more provocative point: webloggers "buy" readers.
To our readers, we give content (knowledge or entertainment), in exchange for their eyes. To other bloggers, we "buy" those eyes mostly by trading on our good names.
Whether they realize it or not (and mostly, they don't), most webloggers are participating in a gift economy. Since we're (mostly) not trading in money, what we trade is something human beings always trade anyway: recognition, respect, and enjoyment of each other. For webloggers, it's our stock in trade, the only thing we can exchange that really matters.
So what is the process I go through, to decide if I'll blogroll someone?
1) I don't assume I have to like everything about a blogger, just something.One way to show me that respect and decency is to participate in the same gift culture I do: offering to exchange links with me goes a long way toward making me think you're the kind of person I'd like on my blogroll. Not that I accept all such requests. But such a request does show me some respect, that at some level you "get it."2) I want to see that this blogger seems like a decent being, who trades in the same kind of respect and decency that other bloggers do.
There are certain well-known webloggers who I do not link to. I like their stuff, but I don't love it. If they showed me that they were willing to trade in the same sort of mutual-respect gift economy I've described, my opinion of them would probably go up enough to want to blogroll them. Because I'd at least be able to say, "okay, this is a person who gets it, who wants to give as well as he receives." Otherwise, I'd have to truly love their stuff. If not, why should I bother? I don't love their stuff, they obviously don't care about my stuff. So, who cares?
Is that selfish? I really don't think so. What I'm offering my readers with my blogroll is useful knowledge: "here are a bunch of sites whose owners I hold in some degree of esteem." And yes, one of the things I esteem in another blogger is willingness to promote others, to participate in the same gift economy that I do.
I think it's also clear that large blogrolls serve to create a sort of pastiche and smorgasbord for weblog readers. They are a sort of half-chaotic, half-controlled, dynamic stream of information. Because when readers see the same sites in blogroll after blogroll, they start to think that there is something particularly worthy there, and will probably, eventually, decide to check that site out. There may be some saturation point where a blogroll is simply too long, but my suspicion is that it's much larger than most people realize.
Therefore, here is my advice to bloggers who want to build traffic:
Be generous with your blogroll. Offer to trade blogroll entries with anyone whose work you find decent. You're helping your readers find new sites they might like, and you're also trading in the gift economy: "I'll share your readers if you'll share mine. I'll hold you in esteem and treat you with respect if you'll hold me in esteem and treat me with respect."
This gets good bloggers more readers, and gives readers a valuable service. That's win/win/win all the way around, wouldn't you say?
The fact that there are two different kinds is a valuable tool for me. Every once in a while, I've randomly visited sites on Glenn's blogroll when I've been bored with my standards. So I like that "smorgasbord" approach.
But more often, if I find a site with just a few tasty bits, I'm more likely to go to follow a link if it's one of only a few sites linked to on the front page.
Many people use Glenn's blogroll as their own, especially non-bloggers who have Instapundit as their home page and use Glenn's links as their starting point to the day. A large portion of my hits per day come from Glenn for just this reason.
My own blogroll is lengthy and with good reason. I don't read each site on there every day -that would be impossible- but I read all of them as often as possible and sometimes it just depends on my mood. I don't always want to read a political blog. Sometimes I feel like reading something personal, or funny, or from Canada. Having a lengthy blogroll gives me plenty to choose from each day.
You made a couple of good points here.
WRT blog rolls, I do both - I maintain a list of a dozen or so links that I really read every day, and a much longer list of sites I occasionally visit. This longer list is ruthlessly pruned, but it continues to grow because there is just so much good stuff out there to read. I do this because I came to pretty much the same conclusion Courtney did.
On a related note, I purposely do NOT have a hit counter - if it showed fewer hits than I expected I'd feel depressed, if it it showed more, I'd feel pressured. I just imagine that I have a half-dozen friends out there who read my page, and I write only to please them, and myself.
I wasn't really asking why, I was just pointing out that you had all my favorites except one or two. I guess I was making a suggestion that you consider adding them, in a sort of passive-aggressive way (smile).
Very interesting -- and pretty much true, too.
Let me add two considerations -- when to cut a blog from the blogroll and design decisions.
I tried for a while to keep my blogroll to people I read every day and gave up -- it took too much revising. I'm also so lazy about the template now that there are some blogs on my list I almost never read anymore. Odd.
Second -- some people make these decisions because of the way things look. I have been bouncing my 'books currently checked out' and 'books on order' entries around. I currently have them above the links, but I may change that.
You put intp eloquent words something that had no more than tickled the back of my consciousness. Nice!
Very interesting stuff... but you have scooped part of a paper I am writing. Darn you to heck, Dean Esmay!!! (now off to cite this entry)
Hadn't thought about it before, but as a reader I definitely prefer short lists. First, it implies more "value" per link; more likelihood that I'll find something of interest there. Second, I've learned that long lists of links (whether on a blog or any other site) tend to include a lot of obsolete sites. Implies lack of pruning.
thank you so much for this
i must say that although ive been blogging since sept of 2001 (yes i know)
i have been blissfully unaware of how it all works
and have therefore remained largely
unscathed by blogger politics and such
i don't know much about instapundit except that i hear the name a lot and now thanks to you
will go and read it
but i do know asparagirl
she is a goddess
one of the first big time bloggers to reach
out and praise me
her kind words
sent scores of readers my way
many of which
all this time later are still with me
i have kept my link list short
because i try to keep it to sites i actually regularly read
but i do admit that i probably hurt myself by doing that
because sending more link love
might
cause it to come back to me thrice fold
as new age folks say
what i do know is that i think its important for me
and i imagine for many blog writers
to try and stay away from caring so much about the traffic that we lost sight of our
soul
i have a lot more to learn
i know this
but im okay with that
because remaining somewhat
naiive
had enabled me to
stay on my own personal course
whatever that is
but i do appreciate experts such as yourself
for writing this way
and educating me
and if i might take a minute here
to say
lord asparagirl
does write a killer site
love that babe
Dean:
Couple of thoughts:
1.) As a professional writer, I blog because I find that it sharpens my skills. It's like a singer doing vocal exercises, you know?
As a result, I usually go blogging (at my site or someone else's -- like yours, thanks!) BEFORE I sit down to write for a client. I find that my head is clearer and I'm already up to speed.
2.) My blogroll is there for my own use as much as anyone else's. I go surfing amongst the blogs on my roll as a way to catch up on what's going on.
But one thing I have found -- not all the entries on my roll are blogs and of the ones that ARE blogs, many don't have a blogroll of their own.
So trading links is often not possible.
Go figure.
Hope this adds to the zeitgeist.
Geez, Dean, leave it to you to find something I once said which I've since retracted. My blogroll has definitely expanded over time for the reasons that Michele has pointed out - some days I want politics, some days I want laughs. In the meantime, I like the thought of readers being able to click through the blogroll and find more things for their enjoyment.
But....why do I need a long blogroll, when I can use yours? ;)
Any suggestions that I can make probably only result in logistic problems of disk space, time put in, and technical capability. What I would see as an ultimate blog roll mechanism would be sortable by:
- alphabet
- by objective popularity (if this exists, or
....at least by hits)
- Your (Dean's) preference
- by hits selected from your site.
- Sites you last visited, chronologically
- (I know I'll think of others)
I also see nothing wrong with a short list of your own recommendations. You have nothing to lose, but the good will of others, which probably is no small thing in blogging.
Wow, and you have been on my blogroll for a long time and here I am in the top 250 now, although I have no earthly reason why unless it is due to Susie linking to one of my posts on a daily basis, and yet I sadly do not find my poor excuse for a blog on your blogroll. I guess I will just go crawl back into my corner and cry about it. ;)
I like blogrolls or link lists of any sort sorted by size, like the menu on Instapundit. Looks awesome.
I blogroll people who blogroll me in return, though sometimes I find it almost by accident. I visit a site and just happen to notice that the guy blogrolled me and I go "Gee, that was nice, let me blogroll him in return!" Even if I don't agree with their content, I think it's only fair if they blogrolled me, that I should do the same for them. :-)
When I was a newbie blog reader, blogrolls were helpful to me in discovering what was out there. But I stopped even looking at them after a couple of weeks. I found that being on a blogroll, even on one of the heavies (Instapundit, et. al.) didn't give me enough context to judge a prospective blog's worth. And I wasted alot of time visting blogs that I would never visit again.
Nowadays, I tend to discover a new (to me) blog only if that blog was referred to in a post on a blog I read, or the blogger has a habit of making interesting and thoughful comments on a blog I regulary read.
That's how I found you Dean, you posted well to Ipse Dixit and I became interested enough to check out your blog :)
Geez, between Dean's blog entry and Rossi's comments, I'm gonna get me a big ole swelled head here. [blush]
But I suppose it bears mentioning that at least two of my blogroll items lead to the *old* location of peoples' sites...oops. I should probably go fix that one of these days...
I put sites that I like to read on my blogroll and it's formatted so I can navigate those links the way I want to. Most of those I found based on comments they made on other sites I already read.
I don't give any consideration to my what my readers might think of it nor do I feel obligated to link people who link me. I blog for fun, not to "publish" so I don't care so much about traffic beyond the fun of getting comments.
I only start checking the blogrolls of sites I visit once I have a feel for whether or not I might be interested in the same things they're interested in.
For those of you who are saying that you only do your blogroll for yourself: fact is, you're still sharing it with your readers. It's also a favor you've done for another blogger, whether you meant it that way or not.
Does that mean they owe you a link back? Nope. But you're not out of line to ask for one, if you want one. They can say yes, or they can say no--it's not about guilt, it's about doing things because you want to.
I find blogrolls which highlight newly updated sites, especially those which put updated sites at the top, to be the most valuable ones to be listed on, in terms of the blogonomics that you are talking about. If one is listed in a very long blogroll, one may never get noticed, even if one were on a high traffic blog's list. However, if that list highlights your blog in some way--especially rewarding your frequent musings by putting you on top of the list, then you tend to get more traffic.
One of the first blogrolls of consequence that added my site was ScrappleFace--and Scott's BR highlights newly updated blog, and moves them to the top of the list. And I noticed that whenever Scott's site was updated, and I updated my site, that I got more traffic. James of outsidethebeltway.com and I called this the "ScrappleFace Effect". I have also noticed that I get far less traffic from big blogs who have blogrolled me, but only have a long alphabetical list.
Also, as a reader, I like to read updated blogs. This is a medium that demands freshness, and so a blogroll that rewards that makes sense to me.
I just started blogging myself. I'm using one those spiteful freebies for the time being. But I remember browsing through sites and weblogs back in 1997. Then I pretty much lost interest and forgot about their existence until the start of the war. When I heard about warblogs, that piqued my interest again and it's been addictive ever since.
What I wanted to add is the gift economy. It has a life over in my field of equines. We just gave a beautiful young stallion to a lady who had bought a very nice horse from us 3 years ago. The horse has degenerative bone disease and cannot any longer be ridden. So, we took him back giving her a younger sound horse for her riding pleasure. This gift economy is common in real life as well in the virtual one of weblogs. This is a good thing.
I'm a firm believer in supply-side blogonomics. I try to keep my blogroll from growing beyond a managable size, because I won't be doing much of a favor to those people if I buried their link in a list of 500+ others. The longer a list is, the less likely much more than the very top or very bottom will be bothered with... even when such a list highlights recently updated blogs.
I find you veryinteresting & quite thoughtful. I'll be reading what you have to say for quite sometime.
You are very insightful & I may be looking at a subject in my way and then find you have a depth to what you write, intrique my thoughts, to where I see things more openly or more intensly.
I don't blog,but--may have to do that.
Planetpuck can be called a blog because I link to stories that make me go hmmmmm and I have a blogroll but that's about it. It really *is* a personel website. The blogroll is there for me. There are plenty of interesting sites to visit that I haven't listed because maintaining a large list is work that Michele is already doing. Once upon a time, Planetpuck was an E/N site motivated by the first item on your list (recognition ...) and the challenge of comming in off of the street cold and making myself popular on the interweb. My goal was to reach 1K uniques a day after one year. I achieved my goal in 8 months with original content 6 days a week, semi-nekkid celebrity babes and the multiplying effect of link exchanges. The 400K+ number on my hit-counter reflects those days. I kept the links that I went too in my favorites and the links my audience was interested in or sites that sent me traffic on Planetpuck. I found that keeping the list short (two dozen or so) sent more traffic to the sites I was trading links with and more importantly, the sites I wanted to encourage to link me back.
Dean you're talking about one of my favorite topics. I have recently been trying to figure out how to manage my blogroll, and it's really not that long. By manage I mean how to break it up into chunks or organize it so that I can go through it all in a period of time. I have added blogs only to drop them within days. I definitely understand your point about blogrolling sites you might not agree with all the time - geez if I had to do that I wouldn't be able to link to anyone, except maybe myself!