Asparagirl Vs Instapundit redux
I was spelunking the web today and came across a Dean Esmay essay Asparagirl vs. Instapundit from a couple of years ago, which is an analysis of link blog rolling / link exchange and the merits of a long link list vs a short link list.
Much of his argument is based around the concept of a gift economy, which makes perfect sense to me given the context of June 2003. But I would be interested in an updated version of his link analysis taking in to account the advertising dollars that have been showered over much of the Blogosphere and will supposedly continue to flow in the coming years.
Maybe Dean would stick to the original analysis, but it seems to me that an incoming link has taken on a new value. A value in the real economy. A value called PageRank.
I like Dean’s link strategy, by the way:
So what is the process I go through, to decide if I’ll blogroll someone?
- I don’t assume I have to like everything about a blogger, just something.
- want to see that this blogger seems like a decent being, who trades in the same kind of respect and decency that other bloggers do.
One way to show me that respect and decency is to participate in the same gift culture I do: offering to exchange links with me goes a long way toward making me think you’re the kind of person I’d like on my blogroll. Not that I accept all such requests. But such a request does show me some respect, that at some level you “get it.”
There are certain well-known webloggers who I do not link to. I like their stuff, but I don’t love it. If they showed me that they were willing to trade in the same sort of mutual-respect gift economy I’ve described, my opinion of them would probably go up enough to want to blogroll them. Because I’d at least be able to say, “okay, this is a person who gets it, who wants to give as well as he receives.” Otherwise, I’d have to truly love their stuff. If not, why should I bother? I don’t love their stuff, they obviously don’t care about my stuff. So, who cares?
Update:
Bill Quick has noticed PageRank and has some questions.