No joke. InstaPundit was one of my first blogroll conquests (this was back when he had comments, so it was a while ago), and despite being neither a 2 nor a 3 I have yet to get past the lower 200s on NZ Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem.

Which explains why so many of the top bloggers are professors: those with more conventional jobs just don't have the damned time to crank out that much volume.

I'm a 4! Woot!*

*I'm being a little sarcastic here.

Probably most of the blogs out there are 4's. They're what got blogging started and, indeed, gave it its name. The problem is with sites that are 4's but don't understand that it means, almost by definition, that their audience will be fairly small. The only semi-exception that comes to mind is Lileks--and even Dave Barry to some extent--but they're in a different zone.

I've always liked OTB blog and it's one I hit on a pretty regular basis for a read. There's always something of interest.

I feel misled. Or used. Or something.

Yeah, I'm afraid if I made a concerted effort to get beyond my 1(a) status it would only take a few weeks for me to start burning out. In fact there were a couple of occasions where I think I had something going that could have built me up higher, but it didn't take long in either case to start wanting to quit blogging entirely.

Of course, if I were making money at it that would have made a pretty significant difference in how long I would have stayed at it.

I never really considered my Blog Roll to have a policy. LOL. I simply put up links of pages I visit. I don't ask people to link to me - they can if they want to. I know there are probably some links missing on my Blog Roll, but I don't have the traffic for it to matter to anyone.

I try to post daily - at least several things. But like you mention, I don't have the time to post 40-50 new things daily. I'm not out to win over as much traffic as possible, I'm happy with the people I have who drop by to visit. It works for me.