In the end I didn’t write this to accuse anyone but rather to warn and inform.

Feedburner hits are always welcome and we get lots, but they are a completely different matter.
I’ve never subscribed to anything myself. I’m too idle and very cagey, so I don’t like signing up to anything. So I imagine that others don’t.

You’d be surprised. I can only suggest you put your feed through feedburner and check how many subscribers you have and then decide 😉

Yes i read your post. thought you’d misunderstood my objective a bit.

I wasn’t trying to do this blog any favours. I had even taken it for granted that putting loads of links in a few posts could actively damage this blogs google page rank. But, I’ve done this before, ever since technorati started ignoring the sidebars.

I certainly wasn’t trying to turn this into a temporary linkfarm. One of my problems with Technorati is that it does reward link-farms.

You don’t need a planet size brain, if you are running a link farm, to see that Technorati ignores links in the sidebars and accepts any in posts. Blog spammers (internet marketing folk) or whatever are way ahead of the curve.

Feedburner hits are always welcome and we get lots, but they are a completely different matter.
I’ve never subscribed to anything myself. I’m too idle and very cagey, so I don’t like signing up to anything. So I imagine that others don’t.

Charmed as I am by the idea that people excitedly opened this blog and then turned away disappointed cos it just had a few posts full of links, instead of its normal wit and wisdom, I am pretty sure that falls under the category of self-delusion. Still I can dream….

For what it’s worth- my user report on them

I am pretty bad at using the “Share this” stuff. Even when it’s visible, it needs you to remember your user name. I almost never can and – because I make up the personal details at random when I subscribe to anything – I can never get the details back when I plan to use the thing.
Stumbleupon seems to generate the most traffic. I should remember to use it more.
Reddit always thinks I’ve become a bot if I submit two blogs in any day and tends to make me jump through so many hoops I abandoned the unequal struggle to use it.
Sphere should be really good but. a syou say, there is so often no relation between posts and the sphere content, it’s a disappointment.

It does not signify readers and it won’t bring you any more of them. Hell, I get technorati authority because people are linking to my wordpress plugin page. Does this mean that they’ve read me? No.

Try to increase your feedburner subscribers, not your technorati rank.

Sphere is very hit and miss – I am not completely sold on it, and it has caused a few problems, however when we removed it last year the developers were kind enough to get in touch and convinced me to put it back 🙂 It might have totally out lived its usefulness now.

Anyway I’ve submitted the site to Challenge Religion. That seems to have its own problems with updates at the moment.

There are a few points I’d like to raise regarding this:

The biggest problem with atheist blogs (and Web 2.0 in general) is that we are all very good at sitting in our own little worlds, writing our blogs and reading the select few we approve of. This is all well and good, but set against that is the massive social machine that is the theist blog. These monsters can generate huge amounts of backlinks which in turn perverts the effects of “innocent” searches (although I doubt there is anyone left on the planet who isnt polarised…).

There are a few atheist bloggers who have massively condemned linking posts like this but, IMHO, they are massively missing the point – sadly, as they also seem to be the bloggers who post but dont read I am not sure they will even see this comment.

LIke it or not (personally, I dont think it is a great idea but…) posts like this have generated more debate between blogs than I have seen in a while. How can that not be a good thing? People who have never previously read this blog (who reads more than 5-6 blogs? Who delves deeper than the top 10 of the blogroll?) have found out about its existence and read at least 1 post – maybe they were curious enough to read more.

How is that a bad idea?

It strikes me as a touch unusual that some of the people criticising the linkfarm post present two apparently contradictory arguments: In one breath they say wanting to increase your ranking/popularity/authority is stupid then in the next they complain that the link post reduces the authority (etc) of the target blog. If they really dont care about their rank, why care if it is reduced?

It is a shame that, other than the uber-blogs like Pharyngula where the most innane, tedious, post will get seventy six million comments, very few atheist blog posts get more than half a dozen. It is great that we are all free thinkers, but it would be nice if we could encourage each other more.

(rant over)

Alun – there is a “Submit This” link which allows people to add to various social networking sites 🙂

I fully agree with you about how weird it is that Technocrappi hasn’t been toppled yet. Given how erratic, temperamental and (basically) pants it is, you’d have thought someone could have done better. I wish I had the coding skills to try! 🙂

I’m surprised that there still isn’t a competitor to seriously challenge Technorati. A halfway decent search engine and some social tools done properly would make for an interesting site.

But, as it turns out technorati decided to ignore these posts anyway so it doesn’t really matter.

And – unlike everybody else, apparently – I do bloody care about technorati ranking.

Because I sort of imagine that getting posts read is generally what having a blog is all about……

I don’t think Technorati has much to do with that. In fact, we get about twice as many unique non-bot visits a day with a pathetic ranking of barely more than 100 than we did when we were ranked at over 400 – when Technorati actually took the sidebar atheist blogroll into account.

However, the point of the postings is not to bump up this blog’s rank. It couldn’t do that. It’s the exact opposite. It was an attempt at altruistic boosting of other blogs on the blogroll in general. Which might a boost a few newb blogs enough so they get any visits.

Not just altruism, of course. I was sort of assuming some reciprocity, naturally

(Or that was the thinking. As I say, It didn’t work anyway.)

It sounds like you may not have taken the easiest way to get the complete list. I have a good method on my atheist blogroll page, if anyone else is interested.