Social blogrolling -- what is a "friend"

There are three main social blogrolling sites that I know of: MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog and BumpZee. They are useful in that they not only let you compile a list of blogs you want to read again, but (if set up properly) let you see who has visited your blog, and you can then pay a return visit.

I joined MyBlogLog a little over a year ago, and found it useful for finding interesting blogs and keeping a list of ones I wanted to revisit.

I joined BumpZee, but found it clunky, slow, and less than useful. It doesn't show blog visitors unless the person is actually logged in to BumpZee, and they have to log in every time they open their browser otherwise they don't show up.

I joined Blog Catalog more recently, when we had a synchroblog on human rights, and found that they were also promoting blogging on human rights on 15 May.

To add blogs to your blogroll, in MyBlogLog you join a "community" related to that blog, and in Blog Catalog you join a neighbourhood. You can also have a list of "contacts" or "friends", which is similar to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace etc.

And this is where things start getting strange. I keep getting messages that people have added me as "friends" or "contacts" when it is evident that they have never even visited my blogs, much less commented on them. I don't know them, I've never corresponded with them, and don't see how they could be regarded as "friends".

Annoying things about social blogrolling sites

• People who add you as a friend when you don't know them
• People who add you as a friend when they've never visited your blog
• People who have blogs, but don't have the widget on their blogs

My own policy, which may be a bit inconsistent in practice, but not much, is that on social blogrolling sites, if I like a blog and want to revisit it, I join its "community" or "neighbourhood". If people visit my blog, I try to visit theirs, and if I find it interesting, join the community or neighbourhood. If, on revisiting a blog, I find that it was only one post that was interesting, and the rest are not, then I'll leave the community or neighbourhood.

I only list as "friends" or "contacts" people I have actually met, or whom I have corresponded with, or who have regularly commented on my blog, and I have regularly commented on theirs. In other words, people I have had some interaction with over some time. Adding people as "friends" or "contacts" when you don't know them and they don't know you seems counterproductive, and to destroy the usefulness of social blogrolling sites, and social networking sites generally.

I suppose Technorati could also be regarded as a form of social blogrolling, in that you can list blogs you like as favourites, but it doesn't show who has visited your blog, and recently its navigation seems to have become much more difficult.

Like many web services, they start by doing one thing well, and then try to do more and more things, and end up not doing any of them well. That's what happened to Google. They started by having a very good search engine, and then they tried to do just about everything, and now they don't even do their search engine well. They too have a social networking site like Facebook and MySpace, called Orkut, very popular in India, not so much in South Africa. But their search engine simply hasn't kept up with the competition.

BUMPzee social blogrolling

A few weeks ago I read a review of some social blogrolling sites -- MyBlogLog, BUMPzee and Blog Catalog. All three have a widget that displays recent readers on your blog, so you can see who has been reading your blog and pay them a return visit.

But apart from that, they work slightly differently. MyBlogLog is a true social blogroll site, where each blog has a "community" that regular readers can join, and if you want to pay a return visit to a blog without the hassle of adding it to your regular blogroll, you can join its community so you can find it again quite easily.

BUMPzee also has communities, but instead of being linked to particular blogs, they are linked to particular interests. This is a bit more focused. I joined and created a Missiology community, since there wasn't one. But as other blogs with missiological interests join, it should become a useful blogroll of missiology-related blogs, and aggregates their posts.

Now you might blog about lots of things, and not every post will be about missiology, so when you add your blog to the community, you can specify keywords, so that only, for example, posts tagged "missiology" or "missional" will be shown in the aggregator.

That seems to have the potential of being a very useful feature.

BUMPzee started as a site for affiliate marketing, and so at present most of the communities are on related topics, but it is now open to everyone (rather as Facebook started as a "students only" social networking site). So don't be put off by the fact that the top communities listed deal with affiliate marketing. Communities can now be on any subject you like, and I think I'll be creating a few more.

Apart from the missiology one, I've started one for the Inklings -- C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams & Co. I know there are several other blogs that have posts on those authors and related topics, such as theology and literature, and it will be useful to be able to look for updates in one place (if they join, and put the widget on their blogs, of course).