I’m not going to make these progress reports a regular thing, but I thought you might like to know that Samuel’s Persiflage is looking like it might be a monthly podcast, with the occasional extra episode.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has listened and/or sent me some feedback, I wasn’t expecting a response anywhere near the size which I have received, so thankyou. (Note: The response hasn’t been huge, just more than I expected)
Samuel
January 11th, 2006 at 10:51pm
I received an email from somebody going by the name of “pintail” today, unfortunately they used the contact form with a bogus email address so I am unable to reply to some of the things they wrote, but there was one point which interested me, and might interest you.
why dont u link to blogs when they link to u, u are selfish
As you can probably tell “pintail” wasn’t very impressed with me for one reason or another, but they have made an interesting point here, so I will do my best to explain.
As I’m sure you’re aware, many blogs contain a “blogroll” or similar, linking to many other blogs which the author thinks make good reading, this is their choice, and I appreciate the links when I notice them, however I see no reason why I should have to give them a return link. If they have linked to this site in an interesting article, I might decide to link back to that article in one of my posts, of course there are also times when I won’t link back for whatever reason.
I do, however, recognise links on a monthly basis as part of my blog view stats, I generally link to the top three referring sites for the month, although this may grow to the top five. I think this is a fair way of linking back to sites which deliver readers, whilst retaining my own editorial control over who gets a special mention.
I will make a mildly unbalanced comparison here to Slashdot. For those of you who are unaware, Slashdot is an IT news/blog site with a bit of an emphasis on Open Source Software. Due to the large readership of Slashdot, a link from there has been known to overload webservers, this is known as the Slashdot Effect. Slashdot is a fairly respected site, and as such, is linked to an awful lot, imagine if Slashdot maintained a blogroll, according to Google, this would require approximately 210,000 blogroll links. There are already enough complaints and conspiracy theories surrounding the selection of stories on Slashdot, imagine how bad it would get if they had to list these 210,000 links in some order…which site goes on top? Which site on the bottom? Perhaps they could have a random link similar to my random quotes…far too hard to be bothered with.
I wouldn’t have to deal with 210,000 links on this site, but it would still be a hassle, and then what do I do if a site which I don’t like links to my site? I’m happy with my system for now, but what do you think? Is “pintail” right? Should I continue with my system? Or do you have a better suggestion? Let me know, I would love to know what you think about this.
Samuel
January 11th, 2006 at 10:36pm