Piling on to the “bookmarks, good or evil” argument.
The author of the weblog burningbush (warning: the graphics on that weblog may make you want to pluck your eyes out) is making the claim that keeping a bookmarks list on your weblog is harmful to the abstract "community" of lower-class webloggers. Well, yes, perhaps it is. But, and there's always a but, what about the people who actually use their bookmarks?
I'm libertarian enough to want to see a bookmark to TSFR on some of the A-list weblogs, but that's only because of the way I use my bookmarks. My bookmarks list, with the notable exception of blog-us-fear and very very happy, is the list of pages that I read every day if at all possible, and when I show up in the bookmarks list of an A-list weblogger (like, for instance, Bitch, PhD) I squeal with glee and dance my little happy dance because, to my mind, it means that they read my weblog regularly enough to bookmark me. You see, I maintain a fairly complicated arrangement of bookmarks; the first level of bookmarks, which are the ones kept on the bookmarks lists of the various incarnations of lightningtortoise and konqueror, are the pages I find interesting enough to want to go back to again. If I keep going back to them (or find them important enough that I don't want to forget them the next time the browser explodes and has to be replaced), I migrate them, by hand, to my big page -o- bookmarks, and then if I find myself wanting to read them every day, they're copied over to the sidebar of TSFR. This is not a particularly trivial process, so by the time a weblog has pushed all that way up, you can be certain that I really wanted it there.
And, um, there's the tiny detail that TSFR is my homepage on every desktop I use. If I tossed my bookmarks list, I'd not want to have TSFR as my homepage, because (obviously) I spend a lot of time online reading other web pages. And if I didn't have TSFR as my homepage, I wouldn't post to it, and if I didn't post to it, I wouldn't bother to maintain my weblog software (not that you could tell the difference between maintained and abandoned, given my update cycle), which was the whole reason I started TSFR in the first place.
So, no, I won't be abandoning my bookmarks list. Community is fine, but I only get 30 readers a day (and four of them are me) on a good day, so I'm afraid I'd rather abandon my public for the ease of being able to get to the other weblogs that I read. I'd be really happy if I showed up on the bookmarks list of other A-list weblogs, but I'm not dangling mine out their as bait for anyone other than me.
Comments
Well, it's certainly easy to fix. I don't actually use my RSS feed, so I've never exactly been sure about how to present data in it. My traditional RSS feed is a snippet from the beginning of the post, under the assumption that the reader will click back to the full post on the weblog, but my assumptions have been wrong once or twice in the past.
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Heh, I don't think I'm quite A-list, but thank you.
FWIW, I do have your site in my bloglines feed, but it drives me nuts b/c I can't seem to get complete entries, only the first few sentences. Am not tech-savvy enough to know if this is me, or if it's you, but if the latter, and it's fixable, I strongly suspect it would increase both readership and comments ;)