Yesterday I read this interesting post by Nosemonkey at The Sharpener, about the British (political) blogging scene. He touched on a concern I’ve come across before, with the rapid expansion of the blogosphere(s?).
[There is] more and more of a closed circle. The better - or simply more popular - bloggers end up reading each other and linking to each other and, increasingly, finding themselves less able or inclined, due either to time constraints or the knowledge that their current blogrolls contain enough good people to find most things so they shouldn’t be missing much, to pick up on newer blogs. Equally, the more people that link to you, the harder it is to notice new ones, or new good ones…
It is a problem. There are a few things I like to do to draw attention to new faces here. I try to make sure that I pay a visit to all first-time commenters who leave a link to their blog (this is feasible, of course, because I don’t get vast numbers of comments). And when I find new blogs I like, especially the history-related ones, I do my best to make sure they get a mention in a post - but I don’t always have time.
I had been contemplating pruning my blogroll: now I’ve moved the full list off the main page to leave just the random dozen in the sidebar, I’m pleased to say that won’t happen (except to remove non-active blogs from time to time). At some point I’d like to organise it better, get some kind of categorisation and maybe add brief descriptions. But I don’t know when I’ll get round to that.
What I have done right now (another of those things that WP makes unbelievably easy) is to add a small section to the left sidebar called ‘New Friends’, which will show the last few blogs I added to the roll. They won’t all be brand-new (and sometimes they won’t even be new to me; it’ll just be that I forgot to add them before). But many of them will be, and if you like to keep an eye out for up-and-coming stars, watch that space.
4 comments on “New faces welcome”
Nice idea, that. I would steal it, but it’d be far too much hassle using Blogger…
It’s amazing to me that Blogger hasn’t got round to doing something about that - OK, there are many things about it that are crap, but that one seems a particularly basic omission. (Of course, in its absence a lot of users turn to externally hosted blogroll services like Blogrolling. Dunno how flexible those are.)
I’m not techy enough to be able to work out too much fancy stuff anyway. And from what I can tell, the more outside add-ons you use with Blogger, the slower the things load. But then again, it hasn’t yet cost me a penny, so can’t really complain…
By the by - didn’t mention it before as it hadn’t been posted, but we’ve started an initiative to find newer bloggers. Mainly after political ones, but there’s often enough of a crossover with you history-centred lot that new histobloggers could count, if you fancy pimping it?
[…] As we move our way from medieval to early modern Christianity in one of my classes, I thought I’d mention an interesting blog that focusses on the early modern period (though not on Christianity specifically). Sharon Howard (post-doctoral fellow at the U. of Wales), who also hosts the Early Modern Resources site, has her blog on Early Modern Notes. […]