It was a bigger response than I expected, to a post that I almost didn't write. Two weeks ago I came across a post on Booman Tribune that made mention of a "blogroll purge." I didn't know of any such "purge" at the time, so I filed it away with a note to look into it later.
It it took me another week to return to it, and start researching to find out just what had happened and how. I took it all in, and wrote a post about it after debating with myself over whether I should or not. I'd spent the past few weeks at work putting together a blog training that included pouring over a lot of writing about the subject involved, and I decided it would make good material for a post.
I didn't think that a week-late post about a months-old event would get much notice or discussion. I was wrong.
There has been quite a discussion, with impassioned responses from all sides, which at the very least suggests there's still something important and worth discussing about the whole thing.
Digging through various search results on "blog purge" led me to a number of posts about Blogroll Amnesty Day, which took place back in February, according to a post by Jon Swift, and which ultimately ended up with some high ranking progressive bloggers deleting their blogrolls entirely and then rebuilding them. Bloggers who found themselves deleted from the blogrolls of these popular sites complained. There were still rumblings almost two months later, which is what I picked up on in the post mentioned above.
Reading through the numerous blog posts about "blogroll purge" and "Blogroll Amnesty Day" made me think about some of the material I'd reviewed for the blog training, and how it some of it might apply to the entire blogroll/linking discussion.
Right after that post, I wrote another about the state of the "Black-o-sphere," of African American bloggers, which was inspired by a post at Mirror on America about how African American bloggers made a difference in the case of Shaquanda Cotton. It reminded me of similar stories, some of which I'd participated in myself, that rocketed across the web and eventually made it to traditional media, powered by bloggers who will probably never be on a "top 100" list, but still had an amazing impact.
It illustrated to me something I think is relevant to the whole discussion of blogrolls and linking: that bloggers whose traffic doesn't necessarily qualify them for the "top tier" have more power than perhaps they realize. Call it the Long Tail, or the Magic Middle, they are highly influential in their particular niches (and many occupy more than one).
These mid-level have some noteworthy advantages. For example, they don't have the burdens of popularity that Clay Shirky illustrated in his much-referenced work, in an example of a blogger who has more readers than she can engage in discussion with, more emails than she can respond to, requests from more blogs than she can read, and who eventually "becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it."
By contrast, mid-level bloggers may have more time for all of the above. They have smaller readerships, but they are likely to have stronger relationships with their readers because they can get to know their readers better and engage in more discussions with them. That's probably why they get more of their readers' attention than some higly trafficked blogs.
More importantly, together they may also have more than some of the most popular blogs. Instead of spending time, energy, and bandwidth over the behavior and blogrolls of others, these "Magic Middle" or "Long Tail" bloggers (of which I am one), may discover they have the potential to do much more if they establish links and create networks among themselves than getting linked by a more popular blog could give them.
Or, for that matter, linking to those same blogs, and thus giving away their potential power.
Of course, the other end of the equation is getting more blog readers to look beyond the top of the curve, for bloggers who may be more responsive and communities where they can build relationships. When I'm not blogging about all of the above, that's something I'm going to be working on a lot more, at my "day job."
