CLUELESS BLOGROLL

“Blogging Research Wordle” by Kristina B is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

CLUELESS BLOGROLL

May 5, 2003

Comments

Steven Den Beste explains, in great detail, why he won’t blogroll you. The short answer: Because your site is probably not any damn good and besides, he wants it to be extra special to be on his blogroll. He throws in an econ lesson besides.

Of course, he has so few people on his blogroll (12) as to make it almost useless as a blogroll. Just an observation.

Update (1151): In a link at the bottom of that page, OTB reader JerkSauce notes that you can generate a lot of one-time visitors to your blog by mentioning the names of attractive celebrities along with the word “nude.” Although I’ve never heard of Kiran Chetry, she does appear to be rather good looking. I’m not sure I want a lot of people coming in from Google, looking for something I don’t have on the site, and then promptly leaving disappointed. But, hey, if you’re desperate for some traffic for your blog, this might work for you.

13 responses to “CLUELESS BLOGROLL”

Chris Lawrence

May 5, 2003 at 12:01 pm

I’ve had a lot of luck with variants of “Jennifer Garner lingerie.” Bizarrely enough, my #1 Google hit is “Chris Jansing” (an MSNBC anchor who apparently has a stealth following but no real fan site). Go figure.

BTW, the funniest part of Den Beste’s explanation of why he won’t blogroll you is its sheer length. The dude really needs a tangent inhibition system, much like I need a parenthetical-inhibition system. (I guess I’m too used to being able to heavily-footnote whatever I write.)
bryan

May 5, 2003 at 12:12 pm

Burying the lead, that’s Den Beste

http://arguewithsigns.net/mt/archives/000174.html
PoliBlogger

May 5, 2003 at 12:43 pm

I tend not to go to Den Beste’s site because he is a bit long-winded for casual bloghopping, and either I have his link wrong in my blogroll, or he doesn’t ping anything, so I never know when it’s updated.

And while I agree overly long blogrolls can be problematic, if you have it set to move the newly updated one to the top, it negates much of the problem of long-ness.
James Joyner

May 5, 2003 at 12:46 pm

Yep–agreed. Although some have complained that it’s hard to find stuff on it that way.

And Den Beste and a handful of others just don’t show as updated, which is just odd.
joy

May 5, 2003 at 12:49 pm

Den Beste creates his blog with a not well known package called City Desk, and I think that doesn’t ping weblogs.com automatically like MT does. He also does quite a bit of HTML and other markup by hand too.

Also, alot of my traffic comes from google, but that’s because of two reasons 1)because I write techie posts, a few of which are popular on google right now and 2)because I referenced some celebrity, like Daryn Kagan or Rick Leventhal.

I don’t mind google visitors, but I’m sure that 99.9% of them don’t stay around too long.
James Joyner

May 5, 2003 at 12:52 pm

Heh. I don’t mind the Google visitors; I just wouldn’t want to artifically generate traffic that way. I note, for example, that I get a few hits every time I reference Dennis Miller. But I don’t do it for the hits, but because I think his forays into politics are interesting.
joy

May 5, 2003 at 2:14 pm

heh. That’s ironic James, since in other parts of the blogosphere there is a great gnashing of teeth about the fact that some popular bloggers get a higher Google page rank than others.
James Joyner

May 5, 2003 at 4:39 pm

Funny on Chris Jansing. I have seen her before but didn’t know her name until I Google’d. 🙂 She’s cute, but not worth a lot of searching….
jen

May 5, 2003 at 4:52 pm

Den Beste usually has good stuff to say, but you have to weed through the verbosity to get to it and it’s usually at the end. Chris is exactly right about the tangential inhibitor being needed. He could just sign up his site with weblogs.com directly to get pinged. That’s what I did in the beginning, before I figured that blogger would do it automatically.

The most popular Google-bringer (yes, I made that up, so what?) to my blog is a certain phrase that I’ll save James from. I inadvertently seeded it to another MT user and he’s now the recipient of those perverts. Second is Jennifer Eccleston (a FoxNews babe) that I mentioned when referring to another blogger’s mention of her.
jen

May 5, 2003 at 4:55 pm

Oh, and it’s a two word phrase that I never used. I use one word often – women – which is pretty common and innocuous. The second word is also sort of innocuous unless paired with “women.”

You’ll just have to live with the curiosity. :wicked grin:
Cricket

May 5, 2003 at 9:32 pm

I don’t blog, but I do surf to them, and I found out about this wonderful side of the internet by doing a google search on scrappleface’s Axis of Weasels story. A friend had read it to me over a month ago, and I have visited regularly since.

I have found some excellent blogs, and have really enjoyed the thought provoking comments and the generosity of the bloggers to one another. Just one more reason to not keep satellite television…I think.

If words be the language of politics, blog on…
Gabby (Gabriel)

May 6, 2003 at 7:34 am

I wouldn’t stoop to such cheesy tactics.

Also, my next post ‘Anna Kournikova: the athlete. Not just some object men are hoping to see NUDE.’ is merely a coincidence 🙂