500 Blogs

I just noticed that my blog roll recently crossed the 500 mark. The blogs are listed by community.

Yes, I have read a good number of posts on all the blogs. Even the ones that make me angry.

Yes, the roll includes links back to me.

I mean someone has to link to me.

If you are wondering. A big blog roll that includes links to people of diverse opinions does not result in reciprocal links. I was just checking Google return links. The links are pretty much all just me linking to myself.

I guess the thing that compels me to make large lists of links to people regardless of persuasion is that I realized long ago that most people are excluded from the inner core of society, and that the perspective from the outside is usually more interesting than the view from the inner circle.

When I started this blog, I thought about making a partisan attack dog type blog ... you know, the kind of blog where people form little partisan attack groups with a small number of links to similar attack dogs. Partisan strategies gets the higher technorati scores. But I would rather go the unrestricted mindfart route and explore ideas, even when the ideas aren't politically correct.

The page counter on my blog roll says the pages have been viewed some 26,000 times. It is likely that most of the hits are from robots. My internal logs show that about 10% of the traffic on the Community Color sites is from bots.

I like to think that the list is giving people in the community some exposure that they would not have without the effort.

BTW, I will pretty much list any blog from the Mountain West (Colorado, Utah, etc). The gaol of the blog roll is to show the diversity of opinion in select communities. If you are from the areas served and aren't included yet, just drop a comment to this page, or use the add link form.

Because I have limited time, I reject sites that are not from the communities referenced on the blog list. If I had infinite resources, I would make a list of all communities. As it stands, I must portion my effort.