Meryl Yourish has had it with blog gimmickry:
I simply don’t care much for the metalinkage. Carnival of the this, Carnival of the that, Battle of the Blogging Consortium, Letter of the Day: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Been there, done that, have too many t-shirts. While I don’t mind being in them from time to time, I tend to go for merit links. That means I much prefer being linked because people think the quality of my post deserves a link, not because someone else linked to me in some kind of gimmicky thing like a Monopoly Board.
That’s how I’ve managed to achieve blogging status. A gimmick link is fleeting. A merit link is a blue-chip investment, because a blogger that links you because s/he likes what you write is more likely to keep reading your weblog, and link again in the future. Same thing goes for readers. How many new readers do you keep from an Instalanche? My readership goes up solidly every single time. How many of you have created a gimmick post, gotten linked by Glenn, and seen your traffic return to exactly the same numbers three days later? Cotton candy is a fun snack, but you can’t eat it for dinner. Here at yourish.com, we serve up full-course meals.
For example, Superhero Dating Ratings, the Buffy Blogburst Index, the Hulk’s Solution to the Middle East Crisis, and the Fudd Doctrine?
I’m not sure how one operationalizes blogging “status,” exactly, but there seem to be a variety of techniques of achieving it. Glenn Reynolds mainly provides lots of links. Steven Den Beste and James Lileks write extended essays. Wonkette has become a huge sensation almost literally overnight providing, at best, snacks. Allah had become fairly popular telling the same joke over and over. Venomous Kate does some metablogging gimmicks–the Letter of the Day and the Snark Hunt–but mainly concentrates on writing. Kevin Aylward has become a top blogger partly through gimmicks like the Blog Awards and his chronicling of all things porn, but also by writing interesting things and improving the blogosphere through sharing his technical expertise.
OTB isn’t one thing in particular. It’s mainly an analysis of the news, especially things related to foreign policy, because that’s mainly what interests me. But I’ve hosted both the Carnival and the Bonfire of the Vanities, done the Blog Chicks Pics, and the Traffic Jam. Basically, I just do this to amuse myself. I’d get bored rather quickly doing nothing but gimmicks to generate traffic–what would be the point really?–but find them an enjoyable diversion from time to time. I don’t mind it if others want to concentrate on gimmickry all the time. If they do it in a clever way that I find amusing, I might link to it. If not, I won’t.
