Stardate 20031204.1149

(On Screen): John Hawkins at Right Wing News has just released the 2003 Warblogger Awards, and I am flattered that his panel of voters selected me for top spot in the category "The Best Original Content For A Blog".

And for Bill Whittle, this: nyaa-nyaa! Pbltblt! Bill's met me, so he knows that I'm 5'11" (181 cm) and weigh 220 (100 kg) and have naturally wavy red hair, now turning white. (By the time Bill's my age, I bet he'll be bald.)

I don't think I should have won. Quite frankly, I think that Wretchard at Belmont Club is producing better material than I am. He is writing as consistently as I have (perhaps more so, given that I've been less consistent lately) and his material is more focused and more cogent. I'm a bit surprised that Wretchard didn't show up as one of the top placers in that category.

Wretchard's background gives him a much different point of view than mine. As far as I've been able to determine from what someone else said, Wretchard is a Filipino living in Australia. That makes his voice all the more important since he is not easily dismissed as a "jingoistic American super-patriot" or other pejorative words to that effect. I have been enjoying his work immensely since I discovered his site just a couple of weeks ago, and I wrote a long commentary in response to the first post of his I found.

I can only conclude that the reason he doesn't appear even once in the poll (in any category) is that he's not well known. Which brings me to the fact that it's time to change the short list of blogs on the sidebar; it's been four months since I last did it, and it's time to give another group their chance in the spotlight.

The basic idea is to select a small number of sites I think are doing good work who don't seem to be widely known, such as Belmont Club. There are probably thousands of sites which fit that description (or whose owners think they do), and I can't solve the problems of the world (or prevent power-law distributions). But I can, at least, do for a few people what I myself wished someone had done for me when I first started blogging.

What happened with me was that after my traffic rose to somewhere in the range of about six thousand loads of the main page per week, it continued to grow thereafter until it peaked last spring during the first week of military operations in Iraq. After that it dropped back down, and since then it's been pretty stable in the range of about sixty thousand per week. Here's a plot of weekly main-page loads since I began collecting that data:

I'm very happy with my current level of traffic; it's far more than I ever hoped to get. I'm actually also glad it's stabilized; when it was growing exponentially it was very gratifying but it also made me a bit nervous. Given that in the last few months I don't think my work has been as consistently good as it was in the months before last March, I'm not surprised that it's actually dropped off a bit, and of course there are more good blogs out there now competing for reader attention. (I noticed recently that Lileks and I are no longer deities. Alas, James, we've been reduced to mortality once again.)

Regardless, back in the summer of 2001 when I seemed to be stagnating at the level of about 1500 loads per week, what I wished was that some high-traffic blog would send me a lot of traffic to help me out. So that's what I'm trying to do now for at least a few others.

But there's only so much refer traffic I can generate, so the more links I include, the more dilution there is for each linked site and the less benefit overall. I try to keep the list short so that each site I do link to gets a lot of exposure. (More on that here.) I keep the list stable for about four months and then change it because I figure that any site I link to which hasn't built a critical mass of readers by then probably never will.

And I replace the list wholesale, because if I did so incrementally, removing one link every time I added one, there would be hurt feelings. So here's a curtain-call for the sites being removed this time:

101-280
Ambient Irony
Au Currant
Master of None
Oliver Kamm
Pyrojection
The Angry Economist
The Karmic Inquisition
The spin starts here
uBlog
Unfit 2 Print

They've been added to the "Alumni" list I've created which is now linked at the bottom of the second sidebar.

I'm not sure I can explain how I pick the people I add, but I am sure I don't want to try. There's really only one thing they absolutely all have in common: none of them have asked to be included. (I would venture to predict that they'll all be surprised that they were.)

That's because I don't want to be flooded with those kinds of letters. I also don't want to receive any suggestions for sites to include. I find 'em, I pick 'em, and I don't explain or apologize. (And none of the people I've added should feel any obligation to me of any kind, such as to add a link to me.)

Most of the ones I pick produce original material, and have been doing so consistently for at least a couple of months, and don't seem to be widely known. Aside from that, they're all over the map.

So check 'em out. And in about four months I'll change the list again.

Update 20031208: Jonathon Delacour comments, including an interesting discussion of the social mechanisms which tend to reinforce power-law distributions in weblog linking.