End of blogrolling, end of blogging?

This morning I got a message about a new comment on my blog, so I went to have a look at it, and my blog vanished. There was just a message saying that the page could not be displayed and I must contact the administrator.

The comment I tried to look at was from "Anonymous", so, thinking it might contain some malicious redirecting code, I deleted it.

But still the blog would not display. I went to the Blogger forums and found that others had had similar problems, which appeared to be caused by blogrolling widgets. They either had bugs, or were being hacked, it seemed.

So I deleted all the blogtolling widgets.

But now my blog is isolated.

It was bad enough when MyBlogLog disappeared, and BlogCatalog was "improved" so that it became almost useless. But I still had blogrolls of blogs I liked to read, and I could see when they were updated, and so could read new posts on them.

But now I've had to remove them too.

Someone really does seem to be out to kill blogs and blogging.

I liked to read "The poor mouth", but can't remember the URL, and the same with lots of other blogs.

For everything there is a season

For everything there is a season, a time to blog and a time to tweet, a time to vote and a time to count votes. A season to visit friends and a season to delete friends.

Holy Week is over, Bright Week is over, the elections are over, and Summer is over.

We're well into autumn, when things are usually harvested or something. Well the leaves from the mulberry tree need raking, at any rate. We did'nt get a single mulberry from it. The dogs and the birds got most of them, and the rest were trampled underfoot.

Then there are blogs, and blogging friends, and blogging non-friends, and blogging wannabe friends and blogging don't-wanna-be friends. The tall, the hamfisted, the pompous and the good-looking.

There are the people who are following me on MyBlogLog, and have made me their friend on Blog Catalog, but who have never visited any of my blogs. They don't seem to be interested in any of the things I'm interested in, but still want to be my "friends".

But there are also the real friends, though sometimes the links are tenuous or broken.

There are the ones like Cobus and Reggie who are now invisible, and whose blogs are inaccessible from MyBlogLog. Please log in and link your blogs, and don't play hard-to-find!The ones like Miss Eagle and Stephen who have new blogs, but haven't linked them, and whose old blogs are not to be found. And those like DaveMac, whose blogs have never linked.

There is Spookyrach, whose Friday cemetery blogging provides the humorous and the macabre, though not necessarily in that order. One of my great blogging ambitions is to have spookyrach visit and leave a comment one one of my blogs.

And there are those whose blogs are linked, but whose log-ins have expired, so they don't show up in the MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog widgets, so I never know if they've visited my blogs, or if they just find them too boring or too disgusting to visit. Like Tauratinzwe for example. Perhaps Oxonian, Roger and Arthur also fall into that category -- their blogs are still there and are linked, but they don't have the widgets on their blogs, and they don't show up as having visited mine.

And there are the ones who have visited fairly regularly, and have sometimes left comments. I'd like to thank them for that. I can't remember them all so apologies if I've left anyone else, but there is Dion, and Jenny, and Bruce (all Methodists), and PriestlyGoth and Crushed by Ingsoc and James and Jams and Matt.

Twittering is OK, but it's not the same as blogging.

And real friends are those one meets on more interactive forums, like those for discussing missiology, or religion, or the books of the Inklings (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and friends) or just anything under the sun.

What a friend we have in Whatsisname

In the last two days I have been informed by BlogCatalog that four people have listed me as their "friend". I don't actually know any of them, and as far as I can tell (and Blog Catalog is supposed to tell you these things) not one of them has actually visited any of my blogs.

On BlogCatalog I am told I am a friend of 30 people, and probably about 20 of them I don't know at all, and they have never visited any of my blogs. By contrast, I have three people listed as my friends. Two of them I have met in the flesh, and the third, whom I haven't actually met, I have been communicating with on line for nearly 20 years.

BlogCatalog is a social blogrolling site; it is primarily a way of seeing who has visited your blog recently, and keeping track of the blogs of people you know. In that, it performs a useful function, but it gets a bit counterproductive when people add as "friends" people they don't know and who don't know them, and in whom they have no interest and with whom they have no desire to communicate.

Another similar social blogrolling site is MyBlogLog. Instead of "friends", they have "contacts", but the principle is the same, and so is the abuse. MyBlogLog allows you to categorise contancts into "Family", "Friends" and just "Contacts", but again, it really makes little sense to list as contacts people with whom you have no contact, and no desire to be in contact.

I list as "contacts" or "friends" only people I actually communicate with. At a minimum, I would say that they should have left at least three comments on my blog, and I should have left at least three comments on theirs. But preferably they should also be people I communicate with outside the blogosphere, either by e-mail or face to face.

Much the same sort of thing can be said of Twitter, where I am sometimes informed that someone new is "following" me, and when I have a look, I discover that that person is "following" (seems more like "stalking" to me) several thousand other people. Twitter isn't even a social blogrolling thing. It's where I let my wife know that I have or haven't bought black plastic rubbish bags at the supermarket so that she can know whether she does or doesn't need to get some on her way home from work. Actually, I have great difficulty in getting my wife or other members of my close family to read Twitter, so it seems that there isn't much point in it, and the only people reading it are people on the other side of the world whom I've never met, and am never likely to.

And to such people I would say, don't follow me on Twitter -- read my blog(s), and comment on them, then at least we'll be communicating. If you don't want to read my blogs, if you find them boring, or irrelevant to your interests, then there is no conceivable reason why you would want me as a friend or a contact.

My wife watched a TV programme a few months ago that mentioned that the average person knows about 1750 people in their life time. Out of curiosity I've tried to list all the people I've known to see if I can reach 1750. I've almost reached 500. It boggles the mind when people are apparently "following" over 8000 people on Twitter, or list over 8000 "contacts" or "friends" on social blogtolling sites.

One social commentator remarked that " The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development - a stage of communication without community". [1] But I think Anderson underestimated it. It certainly isn't community, and there doesn't seem to be much communication either. It seems that the more tools we have to communicate, the less communication actually takes place.

I've ranted about this before, so perhaps some people are finding it boring (another reason why you don't want me as your friend). So perhaps I should end this rant with something positive, some hints on how to get the best out of social blogrolling sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog:

• Log in to social blogrolling sites you belong to, and don't log out. If you are logged out you won't show up on the widget on other people's blogs, so they won't know if you've visited and so are less likely to pay your blog a return visit.
• Put the "Recent visitors" widget somewhere on your blog. Visitors can then find other blogs that they might find interesting, since if they are interested in your blog they will probably find the blogs of frequent visitors to your blog interesting as well.
• List your interests ("tags" in MyBlogLog) so that others can find your blog more easily.
• Don't list people as "friends" or "contacts" unless you actually know them and want to communicate with them. And above all don't list anyone as a friend if you haven't read their blog.

___

References

[1] Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn't what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. Dewey: 909.82. Page 241.

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.