Y!ICTP!*

I just got a box of buffista swag.

Did you just get a box of buffista swag?

Because, you know, since you mentioned it (oh, didn't you?) I just got a box of buffista swag.

Which HM appropriated as soon as it came in the door.

Well, at least mommy's cool now that she has licensed merchandise.

thanks, serenada. Sorry about the whole incessant nagging like a querulous fishwife thing.

*Yes! I coined that phrase!, pace skippy

drop the ruler and come out of the men's room with your hands up

Today I had a munificent five minutes of free time while I wasn't taking a lunch hour and I decided to use the listings on the Ecosystem to reconstruct my reciprocal blogroll, of cherished memory.

I copied the whole thing into a Word file, replaced " links to " with a tab and turned it into a table so I could sort it and delete the links to specific posts. Then I sorted it again.

As it turns out, I have fewer sidebar links than you'd think from the overall numbers (yeah, well, maybe I _like_ single digits. What about it?). The ecosystem apparently is under the impression that http://blurt.com and http://www.blurt.com and http://blurt.com/ and http://www.blurt.com/ are four different blogs (since the kindly proprietor has been nice enough to figure out my alternate links for me, I didn't have a problem with that on my side of the "links to") and those links show up duplicated.

I was wondering if anyone else had less-than-perfectly-accurate links, so I decided to do the same thing with two left blogs and two right blogs in the top ten. This is, of course, wildly unscientific, and not even perfectly accurate itself, since I decided not to correct for abandoned blogs (most of which appear to be on blogspot).

First, the numbers

	Total Links, as of today	Total Sidebar Links, as of today	Corrected Total Sidebar Links, as of today
Instapundit	1,447	1,006	895
LGF	671	520	473
Atrios	782	595	506
Calpundit	718	448	381

The multiple readings of the same blog propagates into the links to individual posts as well.

By eye, LGF has the the smallest group of posters linking to his posts (but fervently) and Calpundit seems at a glance to have the largest number of people linking to individual posts. Prof. Reynolds' readers apparently link to multiple urls for his blog in the same sidebar, which seems to pump his numbers up considerably.

Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that while it's lovely to be able to take an occasional look and see who if anyone is linking to your blog (Don't be bourgey. Dammit, single digits are _classy_), as a ranking system it's kind of a blunt instrument.

Also who the hell cares, but that's just me.

(I love the six of you. sniff.)

Note: I would be blissfully happy if the obsession with linkage continued on the right - I suspect I've been saved from more than one bit of nastiness because someone didn't want to do me the honor of linking to me. And, of course, they were right - it would fill me with bliss and glee and joy for all my former woes a thousand times repaid if I got a chance to delete more poorly spelled hissies from my comments. Links are power. Woohoo.