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July 30, 2005

Blogrolling

Gerard Van der Leun expands on the concept of blog communities I talked about earlier, and Dave Schuler adds his analysis as well. Both hit upon blogrolls. In a further display of the amazing synchronicity that this topic has been generating, it so happens that one of my current TODOs (too long ignored) is to port MT Blogroll to work with Postgres as its backend database (different schema from MySQL, which is where MT Blogroll is targeted).

I think that blogrolls are an under-exploited feature of the blogosphere. As Dave notes, most people set up their blogrolls with their blogs, and seldom alter them thereafter; and when they are altered, it is mostly additions. I treat mine a little differently: I maintain it actively, both adding and deleting, and move blogs around in the list frequently as well. This is because my blogroll is who I actively read. But there's a problem: it's too big, and so the bottom 2/3 or so of the blogroll is seldom read. That's a shame because there is some excellent material down there.

But for most people, the blogroll seems almost to be a statement of community by its mere existence, which means that it becomes stale quite quickly. (How many blogs still link to BBB, which has been dormant for over 2 years now?) And there's really no need for this, except that there's not a good, universal blogrolling tool. Blogrolling.com is useful, as is MT Blogroll. These tools will become more useful as they add new features, and particularly as they are incorporated into blogging tools.

What this all presages is the concept of communities of blogs, koinonia, becoming more easily detected and more commonly understood. I will contribute what little I can by creating a definitional framework. In the definitions below, the "central blog" is the one that forms the starting point for discovery or definition of the community.

Neighborhood: A central blog's neighborhood consists of all of other blogs to which the central blog links in its blogroll, and which also link back to the central blog in their blogroll.
Koinon: A koinon is the intersection of a set of neighborhoods, containing at least three blogs.

For example, taking myself as the central blog, ZenPundit, The Glittering Eye and American Digest are all part of my neighborhood, because I blogroll all of them and they all blogroll me. In addition, The Glittering Eye and ZenPundit blogroll each other, which means that the three of us form a koinon.

Do those definitions work, or are they too broad, too narrow, or not useful?

I should note, by the way, that these definitions are in part meant to be specific enough that koinons and neighborhoods could be discovered automatically, either with crawlers or with reference to Technorati and the Ecosphere.

UPDATE: Actually, I've thought of a better definition, more expansive of what a koinon is. The definition of koinon above should be for a "family" or "cluster" of blogs. A koinon, then, could be the intersection of a set of neighborhoods, where at least three members of each neighborhood are common. By this definition, then, the koinon would represent a larger order community, with a more diverse spectrum of members, which is what I believe was first intended by the term. For an example, see here.

Posted by jeff at July 30, 2005 1:57 PM

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» The Koinonia of Blogdom from AMERICAN DIGEST
UPDATES AND COMMENTARY ON THIS ISSUE @ The Glittering Eye: Why Glenn doesn't blogroll Vanderleun and Caerdroia: Blogrolling ========= JEFF MEDCALF @ Caerdroia expands on my small essay earlier this week, Fear of Instalinking by taking a closer look at ... [Read More]

Tracked on July 30, 2005 4:21 PM

» The Koinonia of Blogdom from AMERICAN DIGEST
UPDATES AND COMMENTARY ON THIS ISSUE @ The Glittering Eye: Why Glenn doesn't blogroll Vanderleun and Caerdroia: Blogrolling Blog-Pods discussed at AmbivaBlog Visual aid from ZenPundit's Koinon Diagrams ========= JEFF MEDCALF @ Caerdroia expands on my s... [Read More]

Tracked on July 30, 2005 4:53 PM

Comments

Hi Fellow koinon-ian,

I try to prune my blogroll somewhat, getting rid of dead blogs though I give the blogger the benefit of the doubt for a long while - for example you took a " break" from Caerdroia but your blogging is of such high quality I kept you on the blogroll hoping for a return. I also drop blogs where intelligent dialogue with the blogger becomes impossible or they simply have become a broken record.

I've also tried to steer traffic a little more fairly by adding the feature that notes new posts on the blogroll so those blogs will temporarily stand out to the reader. Not sure if that has helped or not but I personally find it a useful reminder to check those blogs near the end of the alphabet too.

Posted by: mark safranski at July 30, 2005 5:24 PM

koinonia is a good term for what you describe because it includes both community and the process of dialogue, which is a shifting, sifting movement -- probably akin to a wave pattern if I knew more about how waves operate.

At any rate, the medium of the blogosphere is so new, the players are so diverse, and the reasons people blog are so individual that it's hard to predict which appendages will grow and which will wither. Some day some old fogie will be sitting around telling his grandchildren about the good old days in the 'sphere.

It sure is like high school, though. But more fun.

Posted by: dymphna at July 31, 2005 12:49 AM

Excellent, I'll be glad to include your PostGreSQL ports with the next release of Blogroll. I've slightly updated the MySQL schema, if you want I could send you the new one.

I'm not sure how the dynamic files will be affected by the different databases but I'm assuming the select queries will be slightly different?

Posted by: Arvind [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 31, 2005 2:20 AM