Soccer Dad: Growing gills

November 30, 2005

Growing gills

Mirty's Place is wondering why she's grown gills and is now an amphibian.

A couple of post at Outside the Beltway help explain what's going on.
One tells that the (Truth Laid Bear) Ecosystem Blocking Open Trackbacks. The argument against counting "open trackbacks" is that they artificially inflate a blog's influence since an automatically generated trackback is self-generated, not selected by another blogger. In the other he describes the Ecosystem and the value of links:

I agree with the problem but not the solution. And I don't know what the solution is, really.

The problem, as I see it, is artificial links, not profligate linking. Glenn Reynolds is a linking fool and nobody that I know of thinks that's a bad thing. His links, as with the links that most of us generate, represent exactly what Bear wants them to: a recommendation or at least an acknowledgement of the specific work of another individual. (Or, in the case of the link to Reynolds in this paragraph, a courtesy to the linkee and potentially unfamiliar readers.)

By contrast, we have what I term "artificial" links. These are rote links, often by bloggers who haven't even visited the site in question. The reciprocal links generated by inline trackbacks and, especially, open trackback posts, are one form. For reasons I've explained previously, they don't represent a recommendation by the blogger whose post contained the link.

For my part, I joined Bloggers for Bush. I'm reasonably certain that that artificially raised my Ecosystem profile. Now that those have been discounted, my ranking has dropped accordingly. tweet, tweet.

While we're on the subject of linking. Meryl Yourish asked for links to raise her status. Yes, she asked yesterday. But I'm slow.

UPDATE: SerAndEz rightfully chided me for missing his take on the subject of the reconfiguring of the TTLB Ecosystem. He's not bothered by the change in evolutionary theory and is quite happy with the new intelligent design.

Eric's Grumbles, though, grumbles:

To a certain extent, I see a group of bloggers who have always done things a certain way griping about the new ways things are being done. I see a lot of value in the open trackback posts, inline trackbacks (I think it's pretty slick to be able to see at a glance which posts on a given page have been most heavily linked to), carnivals that focus on very specific topics and so on. Between this discussion and the entire Pajamas Media, aka Open Source Media, spectacle it feels like the the big political bloggers have become mainstream themselves. Doesn't it?

That warrants a "Heh!" doesn't it?

Technorati Tags: blogging, TTLB Ecosystem.