Well, I’ve now been blogging for almost 2 months. When I started, I had no idea what shape this site would take (and I still don’t). As I said the other day, I’ve never been big on writing back in my school days. It’s not that I couldn’t write (though some may disagree), but rather that I’ve always been ‘efficient’ with my words. English teachers always wanted X number of words on some topic. Well, that would just drive me nuts because I could say what I had to say in X/2 words. I guess I’m enjoying writing for this blog because I’m free to say as little as I want. (And also because building this site has allowed me to revisit my programmer/engineer days.)
Anyway, I’m writing this to share my thoughts now that I’m a veteran blogger. 
I must thank NZ Bear over at The Truth Laid Bear (TTLB), for the great exposure I got last week from his New Weblog Showcase. (Go here to see last week’s winner, and the other contestants.) My readership has basically doubled thanks to that exposure. The whole point of the showcase was to highlight some newcomers, and I think he did a great job of that. Having said that, that showcase/contest also enlightened me on a few things.
The blogging universe is very political. After joining the showcase, I was exposed to TTLB’s Blogosphere Ecosystem. For those that don’t know, that ecosystem ranks blogs by popularity, based on the number of links to them. (So if I get my 10 blogging friends to create new links to me every day, I’d ‘evolve’ in that ecosystem pretty quickly.) The top dog is Instapundit, with 1,157 votes vs. 872 links for the #2 blog. As far as I can tell, 9 of the top 10 blogs are political in nature ( obviously lots of interlinking). I guess given all that’s going on in the world today that’s not surprising. But I’ve found the blog world to be political in a cliquish way as well. My first clue to this was when I realized that some of my votes weren’t being counted. I discovered that TTLB only counts votes from blogs that are registered in its ecosystem. So even though I could go to Technorati and see people that voted for me, those votes (links) weren’t counted. (And even Technorati won’t count links that are inside of BlogRolls.) Seems like a simple online form to place votes would be a lot more fair. That would also allow readers who don’t have blogs to register their opinions. But apparently in the blog world, if you’re not part of the ecosystem you’re unimportant.
My next clue came from this (paranoid?) letter that TTLB received, which basically accuses him of part of a vast conspiracy to push left-leaning bloggers into obscurity. This, again, highlights the factions within the blogosphere. It’s clear that there is a large, established circle of bloggers that are “running things” in the blogosphere. (No surprise that the winner of last week’s showcase was a politically based blog.)
Watching all of this play out is fascinating to me. The blogging phenomenon is a great study human behavior, connectivity, memes, etc. Not to mention the amazing (and scary) amount of tracking that can be done on the net. (Go ahead, scroll down to the bottom of the page & click on one of my site meters.)
OK, enough rambling. Time for me to wade through today’s charts.
