A Link Cheapskate’s View
This post is blogging “inside baseball,” about NZBear’s Ecosystem. Skip it if you like.
A kerfuffle has erupted between NZBear, who maintains the Ecosystem, and some members of the Open Trackback Alliance (OTA). NZBear’s summary of the problem is here. Samantha Burns summarizes the OTA position here. (Sam and Mr. Big emphasize that the dispute isn’t between OTA and NZ Bear, it’s between some bloggers doing trackbacks whom happen to be part of OTA, and some that are not.) I count as friends many on both sides of this, and will pass on making a judgement.
But I will comment on NZ Bear’s latest proposal, considered purely on its merits, and from my perspective, regardless of the proximate cause of the proposal. NZBear:
In the Ecosystem right now, all links are equal. But I’m considering changing that. It doesn’t seem right to me that if Blogger A links to 3,000 other blogs, and Blogger B only links to 300, that those blogs receiving the links from B get exactly the same “credit” as those receiving one of A’s few thousand links.
A link is a recommendation; it says, “Go look over here, and you’ll find something interesting.” So should a recommendation from someone who says everything is interesting be considered as valuable as one from someone who seems to choose their recommendations with more care?
Without getting into implementation details or an exact algorithm, suffice it to say that it would be simple enough for me to refine the Ecosystem’s rules so that truly profligate linkers’ links did not count for as much as more normal blogger’s links. But would that be a good and useful thing?
In the title, I characterize myself as a “link cheapskate.” I counted the outgoing links to bloggers on my front page; there are15. Fifteen. I also know that I prune my Blogroll from time-to-time, aiming to keep it at about 100 blogs. Because I like to follow any one blogger more or less regularly, and can’t manage more than that. I also link to the Raging RINOs, with 85 members, a group with a specific political orientation; we have one carnival a week, in which the host links out to 25-30 participants.
So, I don’t give out many links. Yes, I would like the Ecosystem to reflect that. I would like to know that individually considered links carry more weight than large-scale, mechanical links. I would find the Ecosystem even more useful, if I knew that it was valued most items that bloggers had decided to link to individually.
No offense intended.
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