Blogrolling

This past weekend Atrios, the proprietor of Eschaton, declared a Blogroll Amnesty Day, saying, "one of the big complaints by new bloggers is that it's impossible to get onto blogrolls because established bloggers tend not to add them." I thought that adding new lesser-known blogs to his blogroll would be a wonderful idea. Although for some inexplicable reason that I am at pains to discover, Atrios has never seen fit to link to me, I, nevertheless added Eschaton to my own blogroll and introduced myself to Atrios with a sincerely sycophantic email, since he is after all a blogging pioneer who deserves our respect.

But the more I learned about this Amnesty Day, the more I realized that it was a very strange amnesty indeed. The amnesty he granted turned out to be amnesty for himself. He wanted to assuage himself of the guilt he might feel at kicking blogs off his blogroll instead of granting amnesty to others to swarm across the border into his domain. "Everyone feels a wee bit guilty about removing blogs from their blogroll, so they're hesitant to add new ones to an ever-expanding list," he explained. So Atrios deleted his entire blogroll and disappointingly repopulated it for the most part with the usual suspects. Then others in the liberal blogosphere followed his example, including Jesus' General and PZ Myers at Pharyngula, who already takes a very Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach to blogrolling (see updates below). Then Markos at Daily Kos joined this ruthless bloodletting. "It sucks and it feels bad," he said, daubing the tears from his eyes as he typed. So the end result of Atrios' Amnesty Day was to make some blogrolls smaller and even more exclusive than they already were.

Although as a conservative I am opposed to amnesty when it comes to Vietnam War draft dodgers, illegal immigrants and old people, when it comes to blogrolling I am surprisingly liberal, as you can see from the Blogroll Policy I have posted on my sidebar. "I will add anyone to my blogroll who adds me to theirs, whether conservative, liberal, moderate, libertarian or Albigensian, with the exception of spam or porn blogs or anything else your mother would be embarrassed to read," it states. I oppose litmus tests for blogs as well as Supreme Court Justices.

You might think that for all their talk of being inclusive, more liberals might agree with my policy. Although some other blogs have adopted my policy as their own, and my blogroll was recently mentioned in a post about blogrolls as an example of a site that had a blogroll "a mile long," my policy is surprisingly controversial and not universally accepted.

I adopted this policy in a spirit of both self-interest and altruism. In the blogosphere links are like capital. By offering links to others, others would be more inclined to offer links to me. But I am also very grateful to those who helped me out by throwing a link my way or adding me to their blogroll when I was just starting out. Now that I am a Large Mammal, according the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, I have tried to return the favor by helping out those further down the food chain. And I also think linking to others who have linked to me is the polite thing to do. While I don't think my blogroll policy is enough to qualify me for a Nobel Peace Prize like Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh, I do hope that my efforts to spread a little love around the blogosphere makes cyberspace a little safer for democracy. I believe it was those great conservative rockers the Beatles who said, "The love you make is equal to the love you take."

I cannot take full credit for blogrollosity. My policy was inspired by two of the nicest gentleman in the blogosphere. Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice, is as generous a linker as he is a human being. He is perhaps the most promiscuous and exogamous linker in the blogosphere. Kevin Hayden, who is sadly about to leave his perch at American Street, tends to link mostly to other liberal blogs, but he is constantly linking to new and lesser-known sites. "Beating both Atrios and Kos to blogroll rebuilding, my January choices display that I intend to keep them both on our sidebars for the convenience of our readers, despite which blogs I choose to read," he commented on Amnesty Day. "I’ll also prepare meals for my friends and family that vary widely from my preferred dining selections, and let them use the remote to watch televised fluff I prefer not to waste my beautiful mind on." Both Joe and Kevin, I might add, were two of the first major blogs to link to me and have always been very supportive of my work for which I am very grateful.

A couple of years ago New York Magazine examined who linked to whom in the blogosphere and they discovered that A-list blogs tend to link mostly to other A-list blogs. This elitism strikes me as strangely un-liberal and un-democratic. Ironically, major conservative bloggers are on average more inclusive of smaller blogs than major liberal bloggers. Although I haven't made a scientific survey, I have noticed that for the most part the blogrolls on the top conservative blogs tend to be bigger than the blogrolls on top liberal blogs. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has more than 250 links. Michelle Malkin has 137. Captain's Quarters has a whopping 374. Compared with them, the blogrolls at the major liberal blogs look downright stingy. They also tend to link to a wider variety of blogs in their posts. That being said both liberals and conservatives tend to link mostly to their own ideological bedfellows.

I think that perhaps the liberal blogosphere could learn something from the conservative blogosphere. For example, there are a number of conservative communities that blogs can join which give their members numerous crosslinks. This tends to raise their profile in Technorati rankings, Truth Laid Bear rankings and in Google Page Rank. In his recent post on blogrolling Markos said, "a blogroll link isn't a major source of traffic," which may indeed be the case for his blog but not necessarily for those who get a few million fewer hits than he does. He also doesn't take into account the fact that the more links a blog has, the higher it appears in search engines. According to New York magazine, the number of links a blog has tends to correspond with how much traffic it gets.

Limiting blogrolls to a few elite blogs, also reduces the diversity. Apparently, affirmative action is good for universities, but doesn't apply to blogs. Although I am opposed to quotas and am completely colorblind, I would not be surprised if my blogroll is in fact more diverse than those of many major liberal blogs. Some bloggers of color have even learned at their peril not to rock the boat too much or risk getting delinked.

Of course, there are many liberal blogs with substantial blogrolls. Shakespeare's Sister and MyLeft Wing, for example, have very extensive blogrolls. Mike Finn at Crooks & Liars often links to smaller sites. I am sure there are many others. And there are many that have even seen fit to include a reasonable conservative like myself among their ranks. But I think the blogosphere would be better served if everyone's blogrolls were bigger and more inclusive. Bloggers often complain of the elitism of the mainstream press so it seems odd that so many blogrolls should be cordoned off with velvet ropes.

Update: Skippy fights back! PZ Myers clarifies. And a defensive Kos responds.

More Updates: The blogosphere revolts. Here are just a few of the other blogs weighing in on on the blogroll bloodletting: Polimom, My Left Wing, Kiko's House, Blue Gal, Brilliant at Breakfast, Thoughts of an Average Woman, Blah3, Mockingbird's Medley, Hot Potato Mash, Mad Kane, Chapomatic, Howard Empowered People, Instapundit, Classical Values, Mock, Paper, Scissors, Drinking Liberally in New Milford, Pen-Elayne on the Web, Three Sticks, Man Eegee, Barefoot Bum, Three Wise Men, The Apostate, Debsweb, Newshog, Spiidey, The Talking Dog, BostonJoe, Booman Tribune, The News Blog, The Field Negro, If I Ran the Zoo, The Galloping Beaver, The S.N.A.F.U. Principle, driftglass, Republic of T, Faux Real, The Debate Link, Creek Running North and Blogroll Amnesty Day Sucks.

One More Update: PZ Myers offers "Blogroll Open Enrollment Day" at Pharyngula, explaining, "Since the blogroll amnesty day earlier this month was such a flop, I thought I'd reframe it."

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Jon Swift, Atrios, Daily Kos, Moderate Voice, American Street, Instapundit, Captain's Quarters, Michelle Malkin, Liberal, Conservative, Blogosphere, Internet