This is one of those posts that’s really only interesting if you’re (1) a blogger or (2) a frequent blog visitor who enjoys a good blog skirmish. The rest of you may not give a shit, which is completely understandable, so feel free to skip this one.

There is a blogspat going on right now going on between a group of bloggers known as the “Open Trackback Alliance” and N. Z. Bear, who runs the TTLB Ecosystem (the device by which blogs are ranked according to links and traffic). If that sentence didn’t bore you to tears – and by all rights, it should have – read on.

The issue with the Ecosystem is that it can be gamed, and the open trackback alliance provided a mechanism (either intentionally or unintentionally) for artificially inflating the number of incoming links to a site, thereby improving a site’s ranking. N. Z. Bear sez:

Samantha Burns (who I’ve just added to my Crushes blogroll) makes it pretty clear that the OTA is not intended to be a way to game the TTLB system.

Sounds pretty logical and pretty fair. If all you’re doing is a bunch of trackback parties and providing no content of any worth, all the self-promotion in the world isn’t going to mean shit, because you’ve given no one a reason to visit. It’s hard enough to get linkage from the big boys (and girls) of the upper Sphere, but vacant link-whorage will guarantee that no-one is ever going to want to link to your crap.

Beth at MVRWC chimed in with a message to this type of vacant link whore (In her own legendary style…):

It’s always been open trackbacks here at the Buffet – as long as there is a link to us in your post, and hopefully your post is related to the same topic or news story. Of course, we are considering joining the Stuffed Crotch Alliance, in order to impress female bloggers – well, those female bloggers that need a little push and aren’t already a sure thing.

Speaking (again) of The Commissar, he has a good post summarizing the whole debate, but would also like to see linkage weighted according to how many external links a blogger may provide.

Interesting idea, but I don’t know how that would work or if it would discourage linkage in general just to see who gives out the most “valuable” link. It would give bloggers more stuff to bitch about, though. And Heaven knows we need that, because we are a bitchy bunch.

On a side/semi-unrelated note:

After reading Aaron’s post on the link-whorage topic, where he recommends a blend of links and traffic, I decided I needed to open my Sitemeter.

In the interest of full disclosure, before last week’s Debra Lafave madness, we were averaging between 400-800 unique visits a day, according to Sitemeter. Since we had 15,000+ visits last Tuesday (which crashed my hosting account) and 9,000 + last Wednesday, our traffic numbers are artificially high right now. They’ll settle back down to their previous levels eventually, as long as Debra Lafave can stay the hell out of the news for a while.

What does all this mean? Not much. The TTLB Ecosystem ranking is really just a fun way of measuring how your blog is viewed by other bloggers. The TTLB traffic rankings are more important if your focus is advertising and what you can can make for ad space on your blog (which has never been a consideration here, primarily due to laziness and historically meager traffic stats).

Now back to blogging and no more blogging about blogging about blogging.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Bloggery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.