Jim Carson sent me a fabulous link from PRWeb about the way blogging could potentially be changing the human brain. Jim’s got me thinking lately about why to blog.
I have to say that I’m fascinated by real-world analysts who are just now getting the idea that online communication tools are not merely tools for moving bits of data from one place to another but can, in fact, create completely different types of communities in an environment that doesn’t really “exist.”
I’ve been thinking about this a bit myself, as people have added links to my blog and I’ve added links back. I’ve got one link over there in the blogroll that was one of the first two sites to ever link back to me. And while the site was an interesting read, its owner hasn’t updated in months, and it was months between that update and the one immediately preceeding it.
So what are the morals and ethics of blogrolling? Is it blogsphere courtesy to link to someone simply because that person is linking to me? Are the rules different for bigger blogs? For blogs that exist as the sole or primary source of their author’s income? Is all of this published somewhere in the diary of the blogsphere’s equivalent of Miss Manners or Emily Post?
All questions for which I have no answers. All that said, go read Jim’s blog or any of the others in my blogroll. They’ve all got something interesting, intriguing, or unsettling to say.
Good questions, all. On the subject of quid-pro-quo linking… I don’t feel compelled to return links, personally. If I read the blog regularly myself, I link to it. Otherwise, not.
🙂
Regarding the quid pro quo linking: The surge of link referrer spamming has made it difficult to tell what’s a genuine link back. I maintain two sets of links. The first is for logs/sites I visit, primarily as a convenient set of bookmarks (I suppose I could also learn to use my.del.icio.us). There’s a separate section, labeled and well below the fold, for blogshares link swapping.
I only link back if the site is quality, something I actually read. I don’t see the point of directing my hard earned visitors to utter crap, even if it’s polite crap.