Hadn’t realized you [Lauren] designed skippy. That’s some good work there- helps distract from the lack of capital letters!

Ha!

Me too!

I first read about lack of capitalization from bell hooks, who apparently does it in order to de-emphasize herself/person in her writing — her theory is her content, not her anecdotal speech (a slight twist on M. McLuhan, perhaps).

Jon Swift:

No one seemed to see the irony of the top two liberal blogs having blogrolls with so little diversity.

Except for those of us doing research into blogs! If you look into the scholarly research on A-list bloggers, you understand.

–Cliques, anybody?

A-List bloggers are, generally, those who get the most linkage, and the most offline media attention (and update most frequently, and perhaps get the most comments — if they allow them). When you read an offline media article about/referencing blogs, they’re most likely (but perhaps not always) talking about A-Listers.

Jon Swift, pt. 2:

And when [Atrios] writes outrageously insulting pieces like “Why Your Blog Sucks” he doesn’t get called on it by too many people.

Of course not! Calling him out would call attention to our own (little, unpopular, humble) blog(s). We’re certainly not such authorities on the subject like he!

David Schraub: http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2007/03/or-of-blogroll.html (one of your [Lauren] trackbacks)– great post on the topic!! I very much concur.

Zuzu: Read this, a Wikipedia article on RSS feeds. If you have a lot of sites you would like to keep track of (such as when they update), RSS feeds really help. It all depends on how much time you have to devote to reading blogs, as you pointed out. Firefox can do it automatically for you, otherwise you can find many free RSS readers.

Related, Internet semioticians can look at Feed Icons.

So: what makes the blog? Content, or popularity? Both?

I should probably clarify that we were talking both about blogrolling and links. He also gets a lot of requests to link posts, not just to blogroll people, and that’s what the time limits refer to, mostly.

But I profess ignorance on the actual effect that blogrolling has. Hell, I don’t even know how to use an RSS feed.

An interesting discussion at Republic of T (via Faux Real) on the issue of blogrolls and blogroll “purges” (where big bloggers take a knife to their ‘rolls and eliminate sites they don’t read frequently)….

My modest conservative blog has had a liberal blogrolling policy–which is that I will link to anyone who links to me–for quite some time. I’m glad to see that it is catching on. The more voices the better I think, and perhaps that is what scares people like Atrios. As some conservative philosopher once said, “Let 1,000 flowers bloom.”

zuzu: That “I can only read so much” line only really makes sense if a blogroll serves as nothing more than a glorified bookmark list. I think the very controversy over BAD shows that there’s more to it, though. Rolls serve to knit progressive blogs together into a bigger network, and it’s the network and related identity that is the strength of the thing. What Duncan (and Kos, and the other Amnesty people) did was basically rend the network asunder, leaving resentments and hostility that really hasn’t gone anyway.

(It’s weird that conservatives seem to understand that better than many liberals do.)

Boy, you jump on one bandwagon that starts to creak and rattle and fall apart and take a wrong turn down an ugly path, and no one lets you forget it. The Republic of T resurrects the ugly corpse……

I really need to get around to making a blogroll myself. I started on one, but never really got going.