Snowball of Blogs

I've been trying these last two days to make up for having neglected NEPA Blogs for so long. I've been adding blogs that I've received via e-mail or comments, and I've been going back and tagging all of the existing posts with labels. There aren't that many posts, so this isn't as big a project as the still-incomplete labeling of all the old Another Monkey posts.

One of the things that I'm finding are a lot of dead links and dead blogs, sites that simply don't exist anymore or haven't been updated in months or longer. Things like that sometimes make me wonder if blogging's time has come and gone, if maybe people are getting out of blogging and nobody is getting into it anymore.

One of the reasons I started NEPA Blogs was pure unenlightened self-interest. I wanted to improve my Google rank by increasing the number of sites that link to Another Monkey. I had a vision of a site that would link to my site, and to dozens of other sites, and each of those sites would in turn link back to it, so each site would effectively be two links removed from dozens of other sites. In theory, there would be a certain threshold beyond which this plan would raise everyone's Google rank just by the total value of all the links pointing to and from the central site.

And it might have worked, if I had remembered to ask everyone to link back to NEPA Blogs.

There's a thing - I refuse to call it a "meme", because I hate the appropriation of that term to mean something completely different from the original definition of "a self-replicating unit of information, analogous to a gene in biology" - called "Linky Love" that's going around. It seems to have escaped into the wild from its original source and mutated a bit, but the idea is essentially the same as what I had for NEPA Blogs: by having a lot of sites linking to each other, everyone's Google Rank may effectively go up. The original "Linky Love" site seems fairly unenlightened - "Add your link to make money online." - and sounds almost like a pyramid scheme of some sort. Well, I'm not sure if I'm gonna suddenly get rich by participating in this - I seriously doubt I'll see any financial benefit -, but I'll play the game, at least as it was handed to me by Whim.

I have to tag 5 other bloggers and we just keep adding on to the list. You do not replace anyone, just copy the list and add your blog at the end of it. The list will get longer, attract new readers, and you'll make new friends.

The Strategist Notebook
Link Addiction
Ardour of the Heart
When Life Becomes a Book
The Malaysian Life
Yogatta.com
What goes under the sun
Roshidan’s Cyber Station
Sasha says
Arts of Physics
And the legend lives
My View, My Life
A Simple Life
What Women REALLY Think
Not Much More Than This
Life In The Lost World
The True Tales of a Minivan Mama
"Life" is a Noun
Christie Silvers
Marla's Fun Stuff
My Pretty Face
Simone's Butterfly
Just a Flip Flop Mom
Stone Soup
Gill's Jottings
Work of the Poet
Wakela's World
Modern Day Goddess
Livin With Me
Are We There Yet??
Everything And Nothing
Little Wing
The Babblings of Whimsicalnbrainpan
Another Monkey
Multiple Synchronicities and Sclerosis
Skeet's Stuff
The Dreamtime
Life, Or Something Like It
Ink On Paper
mhryvnak.net/blog
Almost Quintessence
My Distractions In This Modern Age
If I Were Queen of the World

The fun thing is, these are (as far as I can tell) all active, living blogs. And, aside from Whim's and one of the blogs she linked, I don't think I've ever visited any of them before! I intend to stop by each one to have a look around, and see if maybe I'll become a regular visitor.

I've taken the liberties of modifying the list into an actual list, rather than a string of links separated by slashes, and replacing any blogger names that appeared on the list with the actual names of the blogs (as best as I could determine them).

Instead of a pyramid, I guess this is more like a snowball. It will keep getting bigger as it rolls along, and no one is being asked to do anything but post the list, add to it, and then forward it to the people who have been added to it.

So who did I add?

• Ashley's Ink On Paper. She doesn't get the number of readers she deserves, and if doing this silliness helps to send some readers her way, then more power to it!

• Michelle's mhryvnak.net/blog. Because she makes me laugh.

• Anne's Almost Quintessence. Also very funny. And I owe her at least one of these!

• SuperG's My Distractions In This Modern Age. Quality stuff that more people should be reading.

• And last but not least...Supertiff's If I Were Queen of the World. A great read, whatever the topic.

So there are my additions. These five are already at the bottom of the list. If you've been tagged, please copy the list and pass it on to five lucky bloggers of your choosing!