There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth and tearing of garments over whom DailyKos includes or does not include on its blogroll. While I can understand how sites will dislike being cut off, I would "flip the script" and ask: what creative alternatives exist that can ultimately make a blogroll, even DailyKos' blogroll, a bit redundant?
I have a few modest suggestions.
This site is awesome, of course.
But recent diaries have led me to wonder: are we putting too much emphasis on this site and Markos Moulitsas' every twitch and grunt?
It's great to have a central "hang-out" of course. I like a fun day at the ball park as much as anyone. But if an update to a blogroll is enough to upset the community apple cart, something more fundamental has become imbalanced.
Progressive bloggers should not be looking to one fellow, one site or one community as their "hub" in a bicycle-wheel model of community. They say that in the South, when you die, you have to change planes in Atlanta to go to Heaven (or Hell....) Daily Kos should not be that overwhelming hub, for a lot of reasons, the biggest one being that the hub model contradicts both the policy goals and the politics tactics that progressives should use to win big.
Kos made a specific decision - and announced it on the front page - that he would be linking to 2008 Election-specific sites that he himself reads regularly. He/his company own this site; his prerogative. But for us even to look to that blogroll for a list of great bloggers for our general intellectual consumption is a mistake.
Instead of looking to Daily Kos to "do this/that for us" we should each - collectively and individually - be looking to "do for self." If you have a blog or non-blog site worth reading, a passive link from Kos is not the way to get the traffic you want anyway, but more importantly, seeking it or relying it as your "key" to development is simply the wrong model.
There are other models that will build traffic better than Kos' hand-picked flat blogroll. Here are a few of them.
- Collaborating on signature lines. While putting your own blog on your signature line is smart, it may be smarter to team up with like minded Kossacks to set up a common blogroll listing a set of blogs, and jointly linking to that list in signatures. Example: there are a number of Kossacks who are from Maryland (yay!) I would love to set up a link page for Maryland Kossacks, either in DKos somehow or off of my own site Crablaw Maryland Weekly, so that Maryland Kossacks could link commonly to the site and implicitly to each other off of our sig tags. Odds are, one who checks out that off-site blogroll will check a lot of sites out from it, yielding a bigger universe of new readers. Commonly linking to regular feminist or other focused routine community diaries could achieve a similar effect.
- JavaScript Games for Fun and Profit. I am a member of the Maryland Blogger Alliance, a largely conservative list of blogs in Maryland united by a piece of JavaScript code, so that one new entry gets auto-updated state wide. Now I am no conservative, but I decided early I wanted friendly diplomatic relations with fellow Marylanders including conservatives for my blog. And that was a smart move; it's been lively and we have found a lot of surprising points of interest The list is up to about twenty blogs now, including at least one other Kossack.
There is absolutely no reason why Kossacks cannot form similar sets of links by JavaScript from their sites, such that the list gets updated just once and all blogs reflect the change. Common interests (feminism, health care, economics, peace studies, etc.) can form that basis. And Kos himself need not participate in that process. A few dozen DIY Kossack Blogger Alliance lists would be a good start. These are, technically, blogrolls, but mutual self-help blogrolls unrelated to Kos' decision making.
- Blog Carnivals. They are growing in popularity on a variety of topics, and should be.
- Expansion of your own product. It's easy to build a site out of blogspot.com, but if you add an easily installable wiki from MediaWiki on your topic of interest (Crab Media's is, not surprisingly, a Maryland "Crabopedia"), you can give people more reason to come back. Scoop, Soapblox and Drupal all have most or all of the sorts of collaborative community features that you have come to expect from DKos. Since I am an attorney and want attorneys to read my site, I have set up an RSS feed for local lawyers to find jobs, called "Crab's List." There are more creative examples out there; please list below what works for you.
There are other examples, including examples that other Kossacks might share here, many or most far better than the one's I listed. Please share what works for your site, if you are comfortable doing so. Frankly, I cannot find the time to get under the hood and make my own site look great the way I want to. Right now, it looks like a house that's 25% done. Damn day job, damn mortgage, very damn Sallie Mae....
The biggest mistake that I see is putting too much valence on every twitch and grunt from Big Orange and not enough on self-development. Nobody came down from Heaven and proclaimed DailyKos to be center of the left blogosphere; this site is major because we decide it is. Believe it or not, Markos was once yet another law student suffering his way through Civil Procedure. He did not volunteer and does not desire now to be any blogger's end-all and be-all.