Kicking Your Blogroll Habit

For us social animals, reciprocity alone can't change world history or the local weather, but an open exchange of our natural and intellectual resources does work magic on initiating and strengthening cultural ties. In the Internet app known as The World Wide Web, reciprocity gives similar benefits to legions of websites now lumped under the ass-backward misnomer of "blog" and that software category's misbegotten offspring, from "micro-blog tools" such as Posterous, Pownce, Jaiku, Tumblr, Twitter, and Typepad Micro, to "social networking services" of News Corp, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other transnational corporations.

Let's set aside the fact that those companies have an Orwellian definition of your right to privacy. With their histories of customer disservice and dissatisfaction, your only guarantee is that your social networking never will be based on fair exchange and mutual regard of valuable information between you and the corporation. It's a one-way street: they take, you lose.

Yes, I can hear some of you wondering, "Yikes! How did our distant ancestor manage, without the Google Gang, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch to carry her across the dangerous Infomercial Superhighway?"

Think about it like this: the executives and developers at those corporations obviously didn't invent social networking. (C'mon, da honeybees must've invented it before doze guys wuz born!) What would you ever take the 40-year-old Internet for, if not a sprawling social network? The Internet itself is really the service, running on a varied mix of hardware and software, none of which has been invented by or dependent upon any of the corporations and brands I mentioned above. Almost everything else involved, from your OS's GUI and your ISP's DNS to your favourite theme for a free CMS, is just a list of nondescript abbreviations.

Sure, you need software and hardware to connect to the rest of us in the sheer technical sense.

Yet we, ourselves, are the real foundation of the Internet. Every Internet-related service, from webmail to chat rooms to blogs, needs us generating content at the very core. Facebook would not exist without us and our friends. Google would have no search results to display, no ad space to sell, without our content constantly being snarfed up by the company's bots.

We did it for years without them. Really making contact with each other— socially, spiritually, intellectually, commercially and even physically— all boils down to us, as social animals, using our own brains to create and post, then do the essential follow-up work of inviting people to visit and read.

Gathering and presenting reciprocal links is a small yet crucial step in the effort.

• kick & kiss

Reciprocal linking between websites ought to be as easy as pie. It certainly has proved both friendly to users and effective for webpage authors since the early days of the WWW.

Nevertheless, a surprisingly high percentage of current bloggers turn reciprocal linking into a chore much harder than it needs to be. Is it due to a lack of basic coding skills, a surfeit of snobbery, nasty old "groupthink" or...?

Maybe the so-called "blogroll" default of WordPress and Blogspot software is mainly responsible. When users initially go through the software's automated set-up, the blogroll appears without asking and they submit a few favourite links to it, but don't return often enough to add new sites and re-validate addresses.

In following the automated script method a bit too rigidly, they mistakenly assume every list of reciprocal links must, for all times and purposes, be stuffed inside a blogroll sort of sidebar. Moreover, as months and years roll by, the users may receive scant help or encouragement to learn how to code a simple hyperlink, whether to a webpage URL or to an embedded media file.

Although selection and placement of particular links are automated by the blog script or by a related function in a theme or plug-in, the basic steps needed to flexibly and easily add a few links "manually" by themselves probably mystifies a lot of bloggers more than they might be willing to admit. When their own subscribers or other blog hosts suggest a good reciprocal link, their initial reaction often is positive; however, the link either fails to appear as expected in the blogroll or is delayed until another person provides assistance.

A better method actually has been available at bloggers' fingertips. It has been used in thousands of link directories, in search engines too of course, and a wide variety of catalogue sites.

I usually just refer to it as a list of descriptive links. For instance, when I collect enough of them to fill up a supplementary page to a blog article, I put the list under a header of Endnotes or just plain Links, then wait for commenters to gasp in amazement at the Big Eyeful on Page Two.

The descriptive directory approach works splendidly for our blog's "Portal of the Two Moons" where you'll find reciprocal as well as one-way weblinks to sites recommended by Kathryn and me. Varying in length from a single short phrase to a couple of concise sentences, the summaries give you the same options you get from search engines yet rarely from a blogroll: because you are able to make an informed choice before you click, you can more easily keep track of which sites you already visited and what information you obtained there. What could be easier and better?

Take a moment to imagine if the reverse were true. Would you seriously want to squeeze Your Favourite Search Engine into a blogroll sidebar? Hmm, it wouldn't be very useful unless you happened to have advance knowledge and photographic memory of the name and purpose of every site in the list of matches. Unfortunately, a typical blogroll poses that very problem.

Besides the blogroll's other obvious drawback of gobbling up precious screen space, it also cramps both style and speed by needless repetition of a long vertical sidebar on every page. For such a sacrifice of resources, it gives us far too little functionality and information in return.

As you, yourself, travel around to other blogs, have you ever noticed comments from regular visitors, sometimes even front-pagers, who are asking for the URL to a site already linked right under their noses? Yup, it'll be in the familiar blogroll inside a lengthwise sidebar that reloads anew each time. Seeing it constantly, it becomes a complete blur.

Last year, Kathryn and I were discussing our best layout alternatives to the same-old blogroll, when I had the apparently weird idea of highlighting just a couple of links in a sidebar. I reasoned that new blogs in particular would benefit from the much-needed attention of basking "In the Spotlight" of our sidebar if we keep it short `n´ simple, compared to being lost in the crowd of a typical blogroll.

For our visitors looking for a full roll of good links, Kathryn and I offer the aforementioned Portal page. Instead of having to recall or guess a site's content by its name alone, Miscellanians can rely on a concise description to help them choose the next destination.

Wee Note re. Ass-Backward Rules & Misnomers :

Yes, my biting remark about "misbegotten offspring" means our little Miscellani "blog-a-zine" too, but in defense of my sweet irreplaceable co-host Kathryn Cann, I didn't need much convincing that our new magazine-weblog-site ought to be faithful to the blogosphere's most crucial if/then clauses:

1. If it ain't been fixed yet, then what makes you think you can't break it further?

2. If the ass-backward heirs apparent of the blogosphere's spoiled brats spoiled heirs apparent of the ass-backward brats of the blogosphere are too busy playing out their favourite scenes from Lord of the Flies to write official rules that apply sensibly to themselves sensible rules that apply officially to themselves, then how can mere women like Kat Cann and I be strong or smart enough to break any?

3. If the word 'blog' won't conjugate and your database tables are a mess, then you ain't got nothing but the blues to sing but at least you won't have to do it solo.

–   V.F.S.