Danah Boyd wrote this interesting piece on some observations she has made on links and linking in blogs. Links are power. Your goal as a blogger is to get eyeballs and the roll of eyeballs is to buy you power and fame.
You like to have your stuff get read.
Danah goes into detail about blogrolls and how they work, and their drawbacks. If I list five blogs in my blogroll, or like some people 60 blogs, you really have no idea how strongly I feel about any of those links. That may be intuitive for you and me, but Google, Technorati, Blogshares and other applications treat those as social capital. If a blog has lots of links it must be popular.
This is a system that is easily gamed and often misses nuances. Anyone can find a myriad of ways to exploit these systems. Seen, ironically, in the Corante sidebar right next to this article.
(click that image to enlarge)
This image shows massive trackback spam on the Corante site, or people gaming the Corante trackback feature. Granted, this isn't a blogroll, but it is a cooperative site element that has been hijacked and would skew the balance of various on-line ranking services.
Blogrolls have been seen as somewhat immune from spamming because the author generally has to update them directly. But, as Danah points out, they are often poorly maintained and usually an afterthought. This is true for my blogroll at present.
One of the best ways to keep blogrolls fresh and relevant is to use Bloglines and use their blogroll feature. They will feed my personal RSS subscription to my blog as a custom blogroll. This means that people in the blogroll will likely be people I'm actually reading.
This is also a stronger measure for the tracking agencies. Right now, I read most of my blogs through my aggregator. Through subscriptions. So I don't see people's blogrolls anyway. But because of the bloglines blogroll feed and the del.icio.us link feed - people can get a pretty good idea what I'm looking at right now without me having to blog it or update all the time.
In an instant-information universe only the most manic info-junky could really create a relevant blogroll.
So, if I link to someone, bots will think I love them. Google and Technorati will proclaim their fame - even if it is infamy. Just like if I link to someone on Linked In I met at a conference. To the rest of the world we're practically married.
I've blogged before about the differences between blogs and print media. Blogs have a lot of accidental readers that come in via these often careless links or from searches that you can tell have nothing to do with you. Yet, this accidental traffic is often what we are aiming for. Trapping Google flies in our maws.
I don't know what strong answers we can pull from all this - except that links don't necessarily measure reputation or strength. I feel that at some level, subscriptions are better measures. RSS, however, is ill-suited to provide the answers we seek.
Via Nancy
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