BLOGGING METAPHYSICS: KATE’S ADVICE FOR ‘UNPOPULAR’ BLOGGERS

If you’re intrigued or distressed about the Salon popularity lists below , you can find both insight and solace in yesterday’s Electric Venom article on Blogging Metaphysics . Venomous Kate adds fuel to the fire about why some blogs succeed and others fail, and why some bloggers give up too soon and others not soon enough. It’s invigorating analysis. A teaser: She identifies the following types of blogger (you can be more than one type):

Isobloggers – who blog mainly for personal reasons
Thinker Extrabloggers – essayists who wander far from their home community
Linker Extrabloggers – connectors who wander far from their home community, and bring back gems
Thinker Intrabloggers – essayists who usually stay within their home community , and start diablogues
Love-Linker Intrabloggers – connectors who usually stay within their home community, and build online relationships
Blogroll-Linker Intrabloggers – connectors who usually stay within their home community, and cite ‘A-list’ bloggers a lot

Her advice for Intrabloggers who want to be more popular: Don’t be afraid to use your search engine to get outside more. And then:

Contribute something original; Say something original; and damn it, make your site accessible with good layout, easy to read fonts, a reliable host, working links and working permalinks in the event someone, like me, wants to send some traffic your way. If that’s too hard for you to do – or if you’re just not good at it – then put your blog away before somebody gets hurt.

Thanks to A Blog Doesn’t Need… (Linker-Extrablogger par excellence) for the link.

DO SALON BLOGGERS NEED TO ‘GET OUT MORE’ TO BEAT SHIRKY’S LAW?
get out One of the things I observed while compiling the tables below was an apparent inverse correlation between the number of inbound links to each blog and its number of reciprocal links. In other words, people whose blogrolls are very similar to the list of blogs that blogroll them, tend to have few people linking to them (smaller circles at right). Yet people whose blogrolls consist largely of uncommon links, outside their community, tend to have few of those blogrolled blogs linking back to them, but a lot of other blogs linking back to them. And this seems to be true even for those that have small blogrolls or none at all.

The obvious lesson is that the number of inbound links depends on what you’ve done to craft and then promote your blog, especially outside the Salon community, rather than on the dubious civility of reciprocal blogrolling. And by going outside the community more often, to other blogs and non-traditional news sources, you also discover more new things to report on your blog, increasing its value to other Salon readers and making it more likely they’ll blogroll you even if you don’t return the favour.