Blogroll bulima - the purge

I'm late coming to this story, but Cernig (who I just added to my blogroll, btw) reminds me that I've been meaning to address Atrios' blogroll amnesty scheme, so eagerly taken up by the A-list lefties who apparently consider themselves the elite of Blogtopia now.

The Newshog blogroll purge has gone very well so far. Regulars will recall that last week I cut every A - lister who didn't link to Newshog from the blogroll and instead added a bunch of smaller blogs who did link to Newshog.

The rationale is this: why should I help drive their traffic, ad revenues and sense of self importance if they don't give a flying f**k about my tiny blog?

Cernig gets that exactly right. These big bloggers seem to forget that the reason they got so big was through the support of us little inconsequential sites who blogrolled them and consistently linked to them while they built their traffic. Now that they're being wooed by the establishment because of that traffic, they're becoming too big for their britches. Maybe we need to remind them that what we gave, we can take away.

Now I can't take quite as hard a line as Cernig. Most of my blogroll is already made up of smaller bloggers who link to me. However, there are some bigger blogs I blogroll that don't blogroll me, but to be fair they're doing good work and I've never asked them if they would. I can't expect they would find me on their own, particularly since I link more to news sources than I do to other bloggers. And many of them, like Shakes and Avedon and Heretik have been kind enough to link to my posts occassionally and answer my rare emails, even if they didn't put me on their roll.

Nonetheless, it's time to put Atrios' blogroll vanity amnesty scheme into motion. Any A-lister that thinks they're too good to bother with the hoi polloi are off my roll and I encourage you, my cherished readers to do the same, starting with Atrios (Eschaton), Kos and MyDD.

These guys are saying blogroll links mean nothing and in terms of traffic generation that's true enough. But they do matter in other ranking systems and one might think that if all of sudden these "elites" starting showing up in Technorati searches with 200 links from their fellow elites instead of 2000+ from us little inconsequential blogs who are "never going to get anywhere," they might change their mind on their importance.

Send a message. If you have these three on your blogroll, dump them today. Don't link to their posts. They're rarely the only ones covering a story. So link to a B-lister instead. I know that's I'm going to do.

Finally I would be remiss if I didn't mention two of the nicest bigger bloggers in all of Blogtopia(Yes! skippy coined that phrase), skippy and The Moderate Voice who blogrolled me when I was just starting out. I encourage you to support bloggers like this who are willing to give new kids a hand up, instead of trying to kick them down.