The Death of Linkage
I first started blogging back in September of 2005. It's hard to believe that to date, Notes from the Trail has 1273 posts and 4980 comments! It's been an amazing adventure into relational creativity. Oh, the places we've gone! I've so enjoyed the discipline and challenge of regular writing. While some of my favorite blogs that I follow have disabled comments, I have chosen to keep them. Mainly because I love the feedback and occasional ego strokes.
However, over the past four years, one thing has changed. I rarely get linked anymore. From early on, I wrote about the necessity of linking for your blog's health and networkability:
In the past year, I've noticed a drastic decline in the amount of blog linking. Perhaps it's because many of the local bloggers that I used to read and run with have ceased blogging. Perhaps it's because I follow many blogs in Bloglines and Google Reader and therefore rarely leave comments on those blogs. I just don't know.
On the other hand, my blog readership has slowly, but steadily increased over the past four years. Of course, when you look at the blogging statistics, it's mind-blogging boggling (stats as of January 2009):
133,000,000 — number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
346,000,000 — number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)
900,000 — average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period
1,750,000 — number of RSS subscribers toTechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)
77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs
55% — percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)
81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere
59% — percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years
HT: TheFutureBuzz; Source
So here's what I'd like you to do if you've stumbled by Notes from the Trail today...
Please link this article on your own blog or tweet about it.
Also, I'd love your thoughts on the death of linkage. Is it just too much trouble to outlink these days? Has plagiarism increased, and thus attribution of sources is dying? Has the blog boom busted? Something else?