So I’ll say this, directly and honestly, to Dave Sifry from Technorati: Dave, you are hurting us.after shelley's post, lauren decided to follow
The Technorati Top 100 is too much like Google in that ‘noise’ becomes equated with ‘authority’. Rather than provide a method to expose new voices, your list becomes nothing more than a way for those on top to further cement their positions. More, it can be easily manipulated with just the release of a piece of software.
You have focused on comment spam and you see this as the most harm to this community, all the while providing the weapon that is truly tearing us apart. You are hurting us, Dave.
NZ Bear, you are hurting us. With your Ecosystem, you count links on the front page, which give precedence to blogroll links over links embedded within writings, and then classify people in a system equating mammals and amoeba. Your site serves as nothing more than a way for higher ranked people to feel good about themselves, and lower ranked to feel discouraged. There is no discovery inherent in your system — no way of encouraging new voices to be heard. So NZ, you are, also, hurting us.
In fact, to every weblogger who has a blogroll: you are hurting all of us.
Rarely do people discover new webloggers through blogrolls; most discovery comes when you reference another weblogger in your writings. But blogrolls are a way of persisting links to sites, forming a barrier to new voices who may write wonderful things — but how they possibly be heard through the static, which is the inflexible, immutable, blogroll?
So for all of you who have a blogroll, you are also hurting us.
If I had a wish right now, I would wish one thing: that we remove all of our blogrolls and take down the EcoSystem and the Technorati 100 and all of the other ‘popularity’ lists. That whatever links exist, are honest ones based on what has been written, posted, published, not some static membership in a list that is, all too often, stale and out of date, and used as a weapon or a plea.
I would suggest the same for your syndication lists, too–when did you last update it to reflect those sites you really read? I would be content,though, if centralized aggregators such as Bloglines stopped publishing the number of subscriptions for each feed. After all, what true value is this information?
Then we would all start fresh. It would be a new start, and the emphasis would be less on who we know and who we are, then what is being said.
after reading all of this, i've decided to keep my blogroll. in the end, i just don't think shelley makes a very good case for getting rid of it.
first, call me old fashioned, but i actually do use my blogroll to read the sites i read. i don't use an rss feed or any other aggregator, largely because i'm too lazy to start one.
second, i disagree with shelley that "rarely do people discover new webloggers through blogrolls." whenever i find a site i like, i click randomly on a couple of links on their blogroll that i don't recognize, just to see what's there. maybe i'm the only one that does that, but i don't think i am.
third, in order for me to buy the notion that technorati or the ecosystem hurts anything, it presupposes that i give a shit. i watch my own hit numbers with some amusement. whether my hits go up or down, it's facinating to wonder why. but i don't watch my sites rankings, or the rankings of any other site. i honestly don't understand why anyone would waste their time doing it. the whole a-list/b-list blogger thing, is premised on the idea that any of these rankings matter. i simply don't think they do.
now obviously other people think they do matter. and as long as they do, those people are going to find ways to rank and categorize things. and they will find a way. by shutting off your own site's input into whatever system the rankers set up will not stop them from doing it. it may make the rankings less accurate, but that won't have any effect whatsoever on whether they believe in those rankings. it will just marginalize some people more in the eyes of the rankers. in other words, eliminating one's own blogroll will not accomplish anything. the real problem is that people take rankings seriously, not their method of calculating the ranks.
at least that's how i see it. my blogroll stays
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CORRECTION: as elaine pointed out in the comments, lauren still has a blogroll of sorts. it's just on a separate page (which is really her bloglines site). i should have paid more attention the first time around.
