Michael Boyle's weblog
marched today in the bitter cold through downtown Montreal. The crowd was in great spirits despite the cold, and despite the fact that there were doubtless dozens of diverging motivations for being there. Some of the slogans made me cringe, but in the final analysis, I am very happy to have gone.
Karl – who was there with his cow – has posted some pics and text about his experience today: Marche pour la paix, Montral.
but when he does, he’s erudite like few others, in the “blogosphere” or elsewhere.
As of today I’ve switched over to Movable Type to manage this site. I think everything is working properly, and all old links to posts should still be valid. There are still some small changes to make, but the big work is done.
a switch to an all-new backend to this site – this accounts for the lack of posts in recent days. Although I really enjoy Blogger, and will continue to use it for other sites, and despite testing and enjoying Radio Userland as well, I have decided to use Movable Type. The switch over has been extremely simple and has gone very smoothly – the only delay has been in the implementation of some features in different ways than the default install suggests, which has taken some learning to do properly. A very nice thing is that all of the current permalinks should continue to work as always.
Many have been writing about Weblogs and power laws in recent days.
There’s a problem though. The articles all seem to be built on an unsupported assumption: that linking to someone is a reliable and meaningful indicator of the reading habits of the link-from weblog. No such correlation has been shown to exist.
I don’t find any support for this assumption. There are two kinds of links on weblogs: links intrinsic to the text of the site, and links in lists of “favourite sites”. When weblogs first really got going, making a links list on your own site was one of the only ways available to help yourself remember to go to the sites you preferred, so it may once have been an indicator of something. In 2003, however, there are many alternative methods that can be employed to get to the sites one wants to read. I use BlogTracker myself, but there are at least a half-dozen other ways of linking to often-read sites. My own links list (over there on the right) is partially driven by my desire to read certain sites, but links also get there because I’m polite, or because I want to reciprocate for someone who would consider my reciprocation (or lack thereof) significant, or old friends who nevertheless I don’t read often, etc.
Regarding intrinsic links, I think that there are so many different reasons why someone would link to another site – and these motivations change over time – that no causality should be inferred. Overall, though, what I would like to know is this: of heavily-trafficked sites, what proportion of their traffic comes from links from other weblogs? And, if that proportion is low, what do numbers of incoming links have to do with anything?
