Read Part I
In his post he also raised the question of why I didn't have a blogroll on my website. The correct answer when he originally posted the question was that I didn't know what a blogroll was then. I'm still a little fuzzy on them (I haven't even mastered Trackback and how to kill the comment spam), but I think the answer now has more to do with not being sure I like the idea of having lots of external links plastered on my site. Maybe it's a sensitivity I developed when I was a corporate webmaster, when it was my job to figure out how to best use the limited page real estate for the exclusive and most effective messaging goals of the company. As it is, my left margin is pretty crowded, since as my blog grows and there are more and more archive links to include. I am, of course, flattered to be included on anyone else's blogroll, including the one from Notes from the Legal Underground, but I don't feel comfortable at the moment returning the favor. At least not in a blogroll.
On the other hand, the blogrolling question raises the larger issue of visibility. Preserving independent voices through blogging is very nice, but it's only meaningful if the voices can be heard. Otherwise it's just a lot of potentially brilliant shouting into the wind. I don't believe I'm nearly as widely read as I'd like to be, and I'm not entirely sure what to do about it. Mutual blogrolling seems like one way to address this problem of isolation, but personally I'd prefer a system a little more ad hoc and interactive. For instance, I'm perfectly comfortable linking to other people's sites inline with my own posts when I think there's something worthy to reference somehow. Also, if people take the time to interact with my writing, through comments or trackback, I'm more than happy to host links back to their sites as part of it. I would hope they'd do the same for me.
The problem with this method though is that it's so easy to abuse. Comment spammers have discovered how easy it is to co-opt someone else's web soapbox for their own selfish purposes (which is why I'm having to spend hours and hours deleting their self-referential crap). In theory I too could make lots of drive-by posts on lots of sites and get myself linked that way, and others could do the same to me. But I don't see this as a huge problem, not from an author-to-author perspective (as opposed to spammers who, in anonymous volume, simply use the visibility of other people's sites to game the Google link-ranking system and otherwise have no original expression to contribute to any sort of dialog). For one, Google, in concert with the major blog software developers and other search engines, has been working to address the spam problem by removing the incentive to do it. Updates to most blog software will automatically append a "nofollow" tag to any links posted by outsiders, meaning that the search engine spiders will not include the link in its rankings calculation. Which means that the only thing that could possibly be gained by including your own link on someone else's site is the hope that someone might follow it back to your own. And that won't happen unless it's clear that there's some sort of value in doing so. The merit of your message will earn you your visitors, which seems to be as it should.