Outside the Beltway

Fixing the Ecosystem

James Joyner · Saturday, December 3, 2005 · 6 comments

Jay at Accidental Verbosity has some good ideas that might make Bear’s goals for fixing the Ecosystem easier and more achievable.

Two of them, purging non-blogs and spam blogs from the list, are obvious but difficult. Bear has indeed pruned tons of them including, finally, the Drudge Report (which I personally added as a joke over two years ago), but until there is a gatekeeper checking out new sites being added to the list (which I understand is in the works) it’s a losing battle.

Jay’s final suggestion is the best:

[L]imit the number of unique links that are counted from any one blog to another. Five seems like a good number.

What does that do? It limits the usefulness even of open trackbacks that are manual, and of hosting open trackbacks for the hosts who benefit from massive, nutrition-free linkage. It limits the usefulness of starting multiple blogs and linking yourself over and over, or guest blogging and cross-posting/linking yourself over and over

One other idea would solve some other problems that I see in the system: Counting only links to unique blog posts, not the blog URL itself. Doing this would:

Eliminate the ranking value of the various Blogrolls for Linkwhoring. One could still join them as a symbol of unity with a cause or for generating traffic but they would no longer contribute to one’s Ecosytem rankings.

Reduce the rankings of blogs that used to be good. Because bloggers tend not to remove links from their blogrolls, there are many blogs that have been defunct or essentially defunct for months and even years ranked rather high in the Ecosytem.

Boost the rankings of hot startups. One rationale given for the Open Trackback Alliance and other such gimmicks is that it’s hard for new sites to climb the Ecosystem because so many long-established sites have tons of linkage. By eliminating blogroll links from the count, those who produce interesting new content would climb quickly.

For some idea how this would affect sites on the Ecosystem, I compared the unique links (“details”) counted as of this morning with the number of links to the main site URL at blogrolling.com. This is not a perfect comparison, since not all links to a site are on blogrolls, let alone blogrolling.com blogrolls and not all sites that blogroll others are listed on the TTLB. Still, it gives a rough idea for comparison purposes:

For all of these sites except Little Green Footballs, roughly half of the “details” stem from blogroll links. It may well be, then, that the rankings would remain roughly similar if my suggestion were implemented. It could be, though, that high ranking sites are considered obligatory inclusions when starting a new blogroll. How does this affect the Large Mammals?

I would note, first, that the inclusion of Matthew Yglesias’ old site (he’s been at TPM Cafe for months now) illustrates the issue of defunct blogs high in the listings. Oddly, though, even though a lot of people (including me) have changed their blogroll, his old site retains very high rankings.

Otherwise, though, the rough 2:1 ratio holds up at this level. Let’s move further down, getting to the level of sites I’ve scarcely heard of:

Finally, we see major variation in the blogroll links to Ecosystem links ratio. From this rough comparison, it appears that eliminating links to the blog itself, counting only links to individual posts, would have the desired effect of boosting the rankings of lower level (and presumably newer) sites that are not “must-add” sites to new blogrolls. Presumably, this would at least incrementally affect the higher-ranked blogs as well.

Steven Taylor and Bryan at AWS have their own thoughts on Bear’s tweaks.

Update (1200): Via email correspondence with Bear, here’s his original post from June 2, 2002 (well before the launch of OTB) detailing the launch of the Ecosystem. Here’s something that sticks out and remains as true as ever:

About this number of links thing. So are you like obsessed with finding out who is “the best” blogger ?

Nope. There’s tons of different ways to define “best” or “success” in the blogosphere. Some might say having lots of folks link to you is one of them, but there are plenty of others (and if you’re gauging your own blog’s success by any measure other than how much enjoyment it gives you, well, that way lies madness). I think it is interesting to measure links because it certainly shows what other people in the blogosphere think is interesting at a certain time, but I don’t think it necessarily tells us much about “best”.

Indeed.

Related:

Ecosytem and the Value of Links
Ecosystem Blocking Open Trackbacks
Blogging and Power Laws
Malkin’s #1
Is the Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating?
Truth Laid Bear Redesign
Blog Ranking Metrics
Tracking OTB̢۪s Popularity: A Case Study
Ecosystem Enhancements
Out of Hybernation
BLOGOSPHERE ECOSYSTEM WOES
MORTAL HUMAN
TTLB SUSPENSIONS
MULTIPLE ECOSYSTEMS
ECOSYSTEM REVISIONS
ECOSYSTEM: UNDER CONSTRUCTION
ECOSYSTEM OUT OF BUSINESS?
ECOSYSTEM IS BACK
BLOG METRICS
BEAR IS BACK!
BEAR DE-RAILED
NAVEL GAZING
ECOSYSTEM REDESIGN
DESCENDING THE LADDER
TRAFFIC REDUX
TTLB TRAFFIC REDUX
TTLB TRAFFIC
SELF-SERVICE BEAR
MORE NAVEL GAZING
BLOG HAPPENINGS
BIGWIG ECOSYSTEM?
TTLB GLITCH
LINKAGE VS. TRAFFIC
RACING RODENTS
I̢۪LL BE A MONKEY̢۪S UNCLE
BLOG MUSINGS
TTLB ECOSYSTEM
FLIPPERY FISH
SLIMY MOLLUSC
LOWLY INSECT!

The sheer number of posts on this subject is indicative of several things: Bloggers like to talk about blogging; N.Z. Bear’s Ecosystem is the most talked-about metric; and bloggers continually game whatever system Bear puts into place, forcing yet more changes.