I was going to write this as a comment on the aside I made last night, however it seems to be a bit long winded for that (not to mention, the aside was supposed to be a bit of a quick rant! 🙂 ).
The previous post, resulted in several good comments from salient, heather and Mana which are well worth reading. Following their responses, I felt there were a couple of points I wanted to clarify – mainly to make my position on the matter clear, rather than actually disagreeing with anything they have said.
First off, my rant which started this was more the result of frustration than anything else. The blogroll is excellent and it has allowed both Heather and myself to discover some excellent, well written and entertaining blogs we would have otherwise missed. When this blog first joined it, we got two excellent advantages from membership:
- Every time some one on the blogroll made a post, Technorati granted a “link” (authority) to our blog if we were visible on their blogroll widget. It was this which propelled us from almost no technorati “authority” to dizzying heights (albeit short lived).
- Every time we made new posts, the **New next to our name drove traffic to our site. This resulted in lots of new traffic for the site, new readers, new commenters and new posts agreeing / disagreeing with our own.
Over time, Technorati removed the first advantage and now it seems Blogrolling are in the process of removing the second advantage. Over the last few days, the blogroll widget we display in the sidebar has done nothing but direct traffic away from our blog to other blogs (according to Feedburner outgoing links stats) – as we have not shown up on anyone else’s pages we have had no inbound traffic.
In reality, for the last three days now the blogroll has really been nothing but a free linking service to other atheist blogs. While I don’t really have a problem with that, it is a touch annoying that there is no reciprocation and, more importantly, we have no say (here at WhyDontYou) over which atheist blogs get linked to. As it stands, we would be better off replacing the blogrolling blogroll with a static blogroll where we chose which blogs were listed (note: at the moment, we have both).
While I am not, at the moment, thinking of removing the blogroll from here (and I wouldn’t advocate others remove it either – it is a good thing!), I do hope that someone with the requisite technical knowledge can come up with a solution to the problems. There must be a sufficiently IT literate atheist out there (or are they all on the sites which seem to always be on the blogroll!)
As further clarification, in my previous aside I was being very subjective when I complained that the good blogs seem to be missed out by the blogroll. I was, in an angry and frustrated manner, trying to complain that (often) if you visit all 25 blogs from the blogroll which should have “new” posts (i.e. are marked **New), you often find little more than a YouTube clip with no commentary or even no new posts. Yes, there are some brilliant blogs on the blogroll which I make the effort to visit as often as I remember, but there are a few that are barely readable.
In a nutshell (sorry for being longwinded about this!), the biggest thing which annoys me is the erratic nature of it all. For example, Pharyngula (an excellent blog) seems to be permanently on the blogroll (*) – which is understandable as he makes ten posts for every one a mere mortal can generate. However, WhyDontYou hasn’t been seen on it for the last three days, despite us having half a dozen new posts. I am sure there is no specific discrimination against this particular blog, I just wish I could work out how to solve it…
As a related aside, salient has an excellent post where he has looked at technorati stats for various words. Well worth checking out, and it seems to identify a global, significant, drop in blog traffic over the period 11 – 17 Nov. This is mirrors in the stats for visitors here, they plummeted around this period. Did the internet break for a few days?
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(*) Comically, I have just looked and for the first time in ages, Pharyngula isn’t on the blogroll. Bah. Toutatis and Loki have conspired together to make me look silly. Hopefully he will be back before you read this… 🙂
Wow, the charts on salient’s site are fascinating.
It even looks as if the blogosphere goes to sleep when we go to sleep (The ref is to the old BBC show Bagpuss) This blog takes a fortnight off. The number of posts falls through the floor. We must be the most important blog on the planet., QED.
Well said. If we had gone away for a week longer the internet would have self destructed. We must make a note of this when it comes to planning future holidays…
TW, you’re right to make the clarifications. I should have also clarified that my commentary was strictly related to the 2 mentioned blogging tools’s services themselves, not the blogs using them, or the Atheist blogroll.
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Ah, now I see what you were saying about the New**. Yes, that does sound like a Blogrolling.com glitch. I assume that Mojoey had chosen the option that offered to indicate when new posts were added to a site. It would be a huge job for him to move the blogroll to a different server, though.
On the subject of Technorati, as I understand it, they stopped ranking blogrolls per se. This means that even if WDY had honorable mention in blogrolls on 1,000 sites, Technorati still would not give you ‘authority’ unless your site was linked within a *post*. This is why a few of us have been recommending putting the blogroll *within* a post. (It’s also why I won’t link directly to creationist sites.)
I think that Mojoey’s idea of a blogroll was great, but, as you say, it can lead to readers leaving your site. I guess that they would do so anyway, if they had not found what they were looking for — it’s just that you give them somewhere to go.
I agree that it would be a nightmare for Mojoey to have to move the blogroll to a new service provider but it doesn’t stop me wishing there was a working alternative.
When I said about people leaving the site, I never meant it was a bad thing as such – I don’t for one second expect people to spend their lives here! As I understood it, the original intentions of the blogroll were that it had a reciprocal result. For example, people would read this blog, then look at the blog roll and go elsewhere but at the same time, people would read your blog then look at the blogroll and come here. This is the bit which is broken (from our perspective) and that is what is annoying.
I have to admit, however, we are back on the blogroll again now! 🙂 It seems our complaints were heard by the God of Blogrolling and action was taken… 🙂
Another odd thing – this is something heather picked up ages ago – when we have a hard time getting posts on the blog roll and they eventually come through, it is always after the nutter blog Al-Kaffir Akbar… Weird…
Salient
Sorry to add even more words to this but. …
We are all looking at different bits of Technorati and a different versions of the blogroll. This is confusing.
My point about Technorati is that it doesn’t count some links within posts. ( E.g. It shows mana’s in-text reference to this blog now. It doesn’t show yours)
I looked at your technorati information and found they hadn’t given you a “link” for the posts to you that were inside the main content of this blog. They didn’t acknowledge your last half dozen posts.
I pinged technorati with your blog name. It did indeed update your list of posts and your links list after that. It showed the link from us in your list of links.
But it didn’t show your in-post link to us in our Authority bit. here.
I think that I finally understand what you are both saying. It all makes me rather glad that I am so tech-iliterate because I think that I’d be even more frustrated if I were tech-competent!!
Al-Kaffir Akbar? Isn’ that the AGW-denialist blog? Good grief.
IIRC you had commented on his denialism — perhaps that explains the traffic.
It isnt just traffic from the Al-Kaffir Akbar lunatic, when the blog roll finally bothers itself to include our blog, we are often immediately below his blog.
I will see if it happens next time we post.
Your blog shifts position? The list is alphabetical! How very odd.
About this **New thing, all you have to do is to sign up at blogrolling.com and ping it manually. It’s a bit tedious, but it works.
We’ve tried that. Lots. Part of my complaints are based on the fact it doesn’t work.
Alll right, then there’s only one thing to do. (Which I did right now)
I have one html slot for a rolling (i.e. “shortlisted”) version with only the updated ones.
Then, I used one html slot below for a static version with the whole list, similar to how people have posted the links in posts.
This won’t fix the **New thing, but it will hopefully work better with Technorati.
Thanks a lot for your help.
Sorry to keep going on about this, but we’ve tried a lot of solutions. We haven’t yet gone so far as to call the blog 11111111111aaaaaaaaWhyDontYou but that may be next 🙂
We have an automatic ping set up. Plus we have started manually pinging the blogroll after we post (when we remember.) If the ping works (never at a weekend) it’s usually so long after the post that we end up appearing halfway down the blogroll, as seen in date order.