It's bear-hunting season for Mister Snitch

The Truth Laid Bear lays out its changes in assigning importance and status to various blogs. We remind him that it's now legal to shoot bears 'round here.

As a blogger, we can't say we don't care that TTLB has devolved us from a fairly complex mammal to something more lowly in the food chain. (For those who don't know, this refers to one of the little bits of business that appears at the bottom of our pages. In fact, those who don't know might as well skip this post - your life will never depend on this piece of information, we guar-an-tee.)

We do care that we've been demoted, and we care that we've been demoted unfairly. While we understand and appreciate why N.Z. Bear has made certain changes, this does not change the fact that, for example, our site has several links to Instapundit (only one shows up) and a number to Wonkette and Gawker (none show up). These are only the most glaring among Bear's omissions (he has us at about 150 incoming links, Technorati has us at over 220.) Even taking into account the Bear's changes in Trackback and 'friendly' links, a great deal is missing. (We don't have "excessive links from blog-to-blog" nor do we belong to a "blog network". Many of our links are simply missing, as they were before Bear made his changes.)

Related: Technorati compared with The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem.

(UPDATE: We note from a comment to Bear's post that only links about a week old are recorded. This remains inconsistent with the reports on his site, which show us with about 150 links. We didn't get 150 links this week! We have also seen important posts less than a week old not appear on Bear's radar. This one, for example, which was very widely linked, never showed up in the "current posts" section. Or this one, which was linked by Lucianne but never acknowledged.)

We care because ranking on Bear's site has some, uh, bearing (oh, like we were supposed to find another word so that wouldn't happen?) on what one can or cannot readily accomplish within the blogosphere. It negates some of the value of the many relationships we've forged. It means that some folks searching among sites richer in relationships will bypass us. We also care because it means other sites' rankings are similarly skewed, and we cannot place faith in them.

On the other hand, we don't believe we're being discriminated against, and we do believe that this has to rate pretty low on the cosmic list of systemic inequalities. On balance, the world is better off with this Bear. Life goes on. End of navel-gazing.

(UPDATE #2: After we wrote this piece, our link count climbed to 188, and the second post we cited in our previous Update showed up. We don't know if the squeaky wheel got grease, or maybe all the machinery got greased at Chez Bear. Some posts and too many non-trackback-or-crony links still don't show up - for instance, we have at least as many links to Dan Riehl as we have to Sluggo. Here's an example of one of the many unreported links - note that the Barista mentions us & links in this post, as well as in her blogroll, but Bear credits us with only the blogroll post.

Nevertheless, we are grateful for TTLB's long-standing efforts to bring more consistent, fair, and accurate ranking practices to the blogosphere. No doubt, it's a bear of a job.)

(UPDATE #3: After an evening in which all of Blogspot went down, we find we have evolved from a fish to a bird and are now a marsupial. This leads us to think that maybe God literally DID create the world in seven days.

We have also gained a number of links during the Blogger blackout. On the other hand, we find our trackback to Bear's post on this subject does not show up, even though Haloscan swears we sent it. We begin to get the sense that the Bear's computer system is run by the same sysop who worked on Down Periscope.)

(UPDATE #4: Oddly, most or all of our self-links have now shown up - fifty of them! We frequently link newer posts to older ones that deal with a related topic. These links should NOT count in Bear's rankings. We'll gladly trade them for accurate link counts elsewhere!)

Categories: Blogosphere