Alan Gutierrez

Why put a person in your blogroll, when there’s nary a chance they’d put you in theirs?

It’s smirkworthy to stumble across a blog with a blogroll that is basically a copy of the Technorati 100. There is the A-List. Someone has painstakingly recreated the A-List. Either a list of blogs of technical luminaries, or else a list of blogs from one side of the red/blue divide.

Must be a newbie.

There’s no need to post your blogroll if that’s all there is too it.

What good is a A-Lister reading list? An A-Lister heavy reading list has got to be wicked dull. The echo must be deafening.

I’m a fan of the Indie Virus. It is an effort to promote the common blogger. The everyblogger. Is is one of many efforts.

Here’s a suggestion.

Cull your blogroll. Remove any blog that is a brand.

Keep only the blogs that have a body behind them. People who you know. People you might well consider friends.

Keep it small. Take it seriously. Let it reflect upon you.

Out and about in New Orleans today. At the gallery openings, I’m encouraging a local artist Adam Farrington to blog. His most recent foray on the web was the Dirt Drive.

He wondered if he blogs, who will read it. I tell him I’ll read it, his wife will read it, our friend Becky, probably the other gallery owners. It seemed to be reason enough.

Because blogging is local. A-Listers bore me. Even the ones I like are too busy to spend time on me. They are too busy to spend time on anyone.

The A-Listers excite the broadcasters because they broadcast, but if I want broadcasting, I know where to find it. This is a conversational medium. The A-Listers will be lost in the cacopohny. There dominions will shrink.

Celebrity is a commodity, just like any other, online or off.

Free Your Blogrolls and Your Backlinks Will Follow – SEO Consultant Esoos Bobnar

True, they earned it, and there’s something to be said for making your site a hub linking out to the top sites in your industry. However, I’m proposing that we diversify our blogrolls a bit. I’ve actually begun to do so myselfIf you’re a fellow C-lister, and you’ve got a blog that’s of good quality, relevant to the field of Internet Marketing, and would be a good match for my readers, let me know, and I’ll consider blogrolling you. It’s got to be good and relevant, though, and posted to at least a few times a week.

Esoos is right on the money. I get links because I read other people’s blogs and because I comment in other people’s blogs. My blogroll represents the handful of bloggers that I read daily, and they are a select few.

I read Esoos because I need to learn something about search engines. I find that it’s better to learn something about an A-List topic from a pedestrian blogger. You’re comments are heeded, and you’re not dealing with someone who’s suffering from authority.

In any case, I’m adding Esoos Bobnar to my blogroll. He’s readable and quotable. I’m not expecting him to do the same, mind you, since I do not match his rediculous criteria.

Both good and relevant? There is no pleasing some people.

Laura from Ypsi~Dixit encouraged me to submit one of the comments in her blog to a humor magazine. Considering that she’s one of my personal A-Listers, this is a flattery compounded. Funny how we write our best blog entries in the comments of other blogs, though.

Yours Truly in the comments of ypsi~dixit: Men’s Studies Conference in Ypsi

When I was last in Ann Arbor, it struck me that this penchant for gender studies had something to do with how difficult it is to meet members of the appropriate sex.

The dating scene is as harsh as it is boring. It seems the only way to be alluring is to be aloof, to run hot and cold. Driving times factor into every encounter.

Gender studies in Michigan are more a product of two many lonely nights driving home from Clutch Cargos than any real pursuit of knowledge or understanding. A slow and meticulous licking of wounds.

It made Laura laugh. That makes me happy.

While you’re there, add Laura to your feed reader. You’ll love her blog if you live in Michigan, or if are an enormous geek, or simply a communications geek, or want a civic blogger to study.

Laura, like AAIO, has a gift for getting the ball rolling, half the content is in the comments, that last link, the civic blogger link, being an example of how she can start a discussion with a less than ten words.

XO Ypsi~Dixit. You’re on my A-List. Everyone should read you!

Hugh MacLeod is on a tear about blogging. Creating one punchy top ten list after another, and now the two immutable laws of blogging. A return to discussion of blogging for blogging’s stake, since he’s been away attending to suits and wine. About time.

Sorry, The Blogosphere Is Closed

There will be no more new blogs in 2006, according to Mark Newsome, this comes via Hugh.

Why It’s Impossible to Build a New Blog in 2006 – Kent Newsome

Once you add the element of money into the equation, the element of competition soon follows. So you get the haves linking to one another (and largely only to one another) and ignoring (or at best tolerating) the have nots, in an effort to boost their status and, perhaps more importantly, protect their shares of the readership pie. Anyone who argues this isn’t true hasn’t spent much time surfing around the blogosphere.

What if you don’t add the element of money? Perhaps you’re not intent on raking in Google Ad revenue. You may have a job or some such.

Perhaps you watch the A-List bloggers prattle and link among themsleves and find it somewhat seedy and incestuous.

Perhaps you’ve seen them go around the block more than once on the Cluetrain, Naked Conversations, Power Law, gobbledy-gook and you just don’t feel like reading it one more time.

What if you simply don’t read A-Listers or care much about what they have to say?

The Non-Business Model

Who in my blogroll has a business interest in their blog? Certianly none of the Ann Arbor or New Orleans bloggers. Could there be some other reason to blog?

Can a new blog succeed? – Ric Hayman

But when I think about why I blog, it has more to do with self-expression. While it might be exciting to discover that half the Western world was hanging on my next post, I suspect that a lot of the joy would disappear in a flurry of expectations. I think that there a lot of bloggers out there who are doing it for their own reasons, and that only a few of them relate to reaching a large audience, and/or making money.

My motive for blogging was driven by an open source ideal of communicating my hacks in the hope that someone, somewhere would find it and get a head start.

Post post K this has morphed to a process of introspection that leverages the long tail.

Ric closes with, “I think the ‘success’ or otherwise of any blog depends entirely on the blogger’s own definition of success …”

For your blog, how do you define success?