Blog-linking

As I've probably stated before, we here at TWM don't really talk about other blogs except in their substance; in other words, we talk about what other blogs are talking about that's related to politics, history, war, or any of the other topics of weight and substance we enjoy writing about. We don't generally engage in tit-for-tat with other blogs, or discussions of blog-politics, or blog gossip, or any of the other things that are primarily of interest to other bloggers because our blog, while it may be read mostly by other bloggers, is aimed primarily at the "average" reader of online news. That's probably a result of a combination of our personal interests and the lack of time we have to blog everything we'd like to blog about. Still, every now and then a blog-centric topic is worth addressing. One such topic is "blogrolling", a convention in which bloggers link to other blogs on their own blog. Jon Swift discusses the unfortunate tendency of prominent liberal bloggers to link only to other prominent liberal bloggers, either out of habit or out of conscious effort. This is unfortunate, for it has the tendency to perpetuate an echo-chamber effect wherein bloggers read and are read only by other bloggers who share the same opinions as they do. It also limits the exposure of small blogs, who greatly benefit from increased traffic when a prominent blog links to them.

We here at TWM prefer a different approach. We link to several large blogs, but not the most prominent (who don't need our help and who you probably know about already anyway) and we link to many smaller blogs whose readership is about the same as ours (which is to say, small.) We would like to make sure that all blogs have an opportunity to be heard in the larger blogosphere, and we're willing to do all small part to help. Our blogroll has expanded only slowly in last year or so as I've shifted from navigating to blogs via TWM's front page to using Bloglines to track my favorite blogs. I will shortly be adding quite a few of those blogs to our blogroll to correct that. But if you would like to be added to our blogroll, please feel free to email us. We would be happy to add anyone to our blogroll who we believe has something to offer to the public discourse, whether you are on the left or the right, or not political at all. The more the merrier, we say.

UPDATE: Jon Swift has updated his post to include the reactions of some other bloggers on the "Blogroll Amnesty Day" he initially blogged about. I think it's worth perusing those blogs and their comments for an idea of how people approach reading and linking to other blogs. I will say that I personally regard our blogroll as a list of recommendations for our readers, but that I use Bloglines to keep track of the blogs I prefer to read on a daily basis (though of course there is considerable overlap between the two.) This includes larger blogs that I enjoy reading but that do not need our help when it comes to linkage.