On Linking and Popularity

Orac has noted his fall in the TTLB Ecosystem. Once ranked among the Large Mammals of the ecosystem his blog Respectful Insolence has stumbled to the level of Marauding Marsupial. Meanwhile PZ Myers has a sneaky trick for boosting his link popularity. A cognate series of posts caught my eye last month at Burning Bird. Why link?

The links on the right are up for a few reasons. The Archaeoastronomy links are up because the address of this site is archaeoastronomy.co.uk. There was a possibility that it was going to be used by ISAAC or one of Clive’s things and it was a case of grabbing it while I could. Now it looks like that’ll be www.archaeoastronomy.org. Which left this address free when I decided to set up my blog. If I was starting from scratch then I’d probably have gone for crasfaciam.co.uk. So the links on the right direct people who want to visit an entirely archaeoastronomical site.

The organisations links are organisations I’m a member of. I plan to join a few others, but I can’t help thinking if I was an out and out classicist or archaeologist life would be cheaper. Down on the bottom right are the referrals as I might well be interested in the sites of people who link to me.

That just leaves the ‘links’ bit. They were up because I clicked on them. I’m getting to grips with livemarks now so I’m using them less. This is why neither Savage Minds nor Respectful Insolence have made an appearance on it. I’ve just livemarked Field Notes so you won’t see that either.

The only other reason for linking is as a social signifier (see Mathemagenic for more on this). I’m not socially adept enough to keep up with that type of game. I’d rather link to Some Kind of Blog because it has a really nice picture of an amaryllis rather than leave you to guess what the link’s about.

I think some of the arguments over what to do come from an obsession I’ve opted-out of. Visitor counts. I could have a rough guess at the readership from the referrals system, but I’ve very little idea of exactly how many people are visiting. Size of audience is not something that interests me. I’ve got this online to answer the question “What are you doing now?” which I get a lot and to practice writing. It always comes as a small shock when someone new comments. It makes me think someone might be reading this. If I thought that was true you’d have something very different on here instead. Certainly I was amazed by the reaction to the Viking Name Generator. It looked for a while as though I’d have to upgrade my web account, so if I’d known what was going to happen I would never have put it back online. My cunning plan then is to reduce visitor counts will dull entries on blogging like this one.

What I may do more of are short ‘look at this’ posts which explain a little about why I think something’s interesting. So if you see links appearing or disappearing over the next few days it won’t be meant as a personal insult. Except to PZ Myers obviously. I’m de-linking you until you do your worst

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