Aggregate

There's been a surge of lists and aggregators in the last few months. My linkage has increased due to a common link list put out by Joe Carter; I've gone from being around 1300 in the TTLB Ecosystem to around 500 today (485 as we go to press).

However, my traffic hasn't gone up much, maybe ten percent, while my links have nearly doubled. Just because someone slaps a link list on the right or left side of their screen doesn't mean people will use it. If everyone has the same list, it becomes background noise and doesn't really mean anything.

Bene's asking whether such gamesmanship is deceitful. It does remind me of some of the bogus accounting that went on in the dot-com boom era, where web sites would sell banner ads for each other's sites. Here's a passage from a post on the dot-bombs from 2002

In growth companies that have yet to show a profit but are expected to in the future, people will often look at revenues rather than net income to try to evaluate a company. "Lazy Susan" deals (the money just wheels back and forth between two parties) were often done to nominally increase revenues. If I pay $1,000,000 each to Kevin, Ben and Louder to place a series of ads on their sites (just try cashing those checks) and they pay $1,000,000 each to place a series of ads on my site, I can loudly proclaim to Wall Street, "Look! Revenues are up three million!" So are expenses, and there is no economic change other than reciprocal ads.

The link-list craze seems to be loosely akin to that. If the coin of the realm in the Blogosphere is number of links, link-list swaps are the moral equivalent of those dot-bomb Lazy Susan deals. It doesn't change the real value (number of readers) but just changes the number of links.

In theory, it will raise blogs rankings in Google, but that often brings in traffic that's not really interested in your topics; about half of my Google hits aren't getting real information on what they're looking for. It should also bring in more traffic from secular sources who see these highly-rated blogs and want to check them out; I might get one hit from the TTLB site a week (26 uniques total since I put in the hit meter about a year ago).

At this point, the only effect is inflated TTLB link figures. I don't see increased traffic that would go with it. If people are part of a personalized list, I take that seriously and will tend to check those sites out if I like the writer who put them there. The generic lists don't get that kind of click rate with me.

I haven't put up any of these evangelical blog lists, since it runs counter to what I use that list for; I put up the blogs I read. There's a bit of a lag between when I start reading a blog and when I give it a permalink, and some sites wind up falling out of my rotation, but there's a good correlation between what I'm linking to and what I'm reading. That may be unsocial, but that's me.

Somehow, I struck a cord with my Evangelical Ghetto post two years ago; one guy has his evangelical blogroll entitled Evangelical Ghetto. That post prompted the aggregator and blogroll scene that Bene's critiquing today.

Even after this link-rank boosting, I still think that we're almost as segregated as ever, with the exception of a handful of top evangelical political blogs that will be cited in secular conservative media like Joe Carter or LaShawn Barber. Get beyond the top tier and there's little back-and-forth outside of an evangelical/Catholic Blogosphere. I used to get traffic from non-Christian sites in the past, back when I had more back-and-forth with them. Now, most of my linkage outside the Ghetto comes from archival links from this ill-advised post.

I'm not sure if other Christian bloggers who were at this in 2002 before a Christian Blogopshere existed had the same effect; we got more outside linkage then than we do now. We also probably linked to those sites more than we do now.

Is the answer linking to secular sites and getting a conversation started?

Comments

[Bene Diction]

You are asking some good questions and have made some good points better than I can.

A fair bit of my traffic is none faith types - but that is what I chose. I get a good blend of both, and it's something that does take a bit of thought.

I think what Rachel C said in the comments makes sense, she has written about counters/rankings/hits before.

*But who pays attention to the ecosystem? (Or rather, when people check out the ecosystem, is it about ego?)*

Do you think of the maturity we've bantered back and forth about in the god-blog subdivision is about moving through the newness of blogging and the excitement of traffic?
I can fully appreciate any new blogger posting about traffic and their excitement, most of us have.:^) Is it growth and understanding that helps up move past that?