It’s difficult to develop a readership and even more difficult than ever due to a growing number of websites — and blogs. Many blogs can’t get links to expand their readership because they’re smaller than bigger blogs, run into some big blog owners who may exhibit snobbism (most blog owners do NOT) or — most importantly — they’re not ideologically pure enough to get linked to regularly by those on the right or left.
With that in mind, skippy the bush kangaroo (who writes in lower case and invented the word “blogtopia”) and Jon Swift created Blogroll Amnesty Day. Read their full explanations HERE and HERE. Another partner in this is Blue Gal who explains more HERE. The basic idea: link to five smaller blogs and help share a bigger blog’s audience with a smaller blog. Go to the links to read complete details.
Here at TMV, we never forget the bloggers who were not nice (no names here) and the bloggers who were encouraging (among many Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, Citizen Smash, Dean Esmay, John Amato, Kevin Aylward, Stephen Green, The Talking Dog, and others) when we first started. So we REGULARLY link to smaller blogs of all kinds of blogs in our roundups and Around The Sphere (most links we use we found — and are not of posts bloggers have sent us).
In that spirit, here’s a list of MUST READ POSTS on other blogs. We’ll give you far more than five to explore — and to bookmark and return to again and again. Blogs of varying viewpoints. Here is our MUST READ LIST:
Not A Pleasant Subject To Read About but why we must “fix” our pets. Wildrun on gassing cats in shelters.
The Blogpound is another blog that focuses on pet issues.
Is Sarah Palin Basically Just Another Welfare Queen? Read Lt. Nixon.
Black History Month: A must read post and comments at Mirror on America.
Important Headlines For Independent Voters at The Hankster.
Puff The Magic Dragon May Become The Theme Song Of Michael Phelps and the question is: will America forgive him? Some thoughts HERE.
A Porn Star Possibly Running Against A Republican Caught In A Prostitute Scandal? It could happen…
Will History Show That George Bush Was Right? Some say yes.
Barack Obama Left Open Renditions or did he?
Who Knows A Lot About Stimulus Plans? Rush Limbaugh does for sure.
One Of TMV’s Original Co-Bloggers And A Great Writer/Journalist is relaunching his own blog. (When he posts here, he uplifts our site. He doesn’t post much but he’s a role model for anyone who writes.)
The Recovery Plan And Mortages: Some thoughts from A Red Mind In A Blue State.
More On Pajamas Media from one of TMV’s favorite conservative blogs Right Thinking From The Left Coast here. Read this post as well.
NOTE TO NONBLOGGERS: Linking is essential on the Internet. The idea is that sites are interwired and they help other sites grow. The problems: too often bigger bloggers won’t link to smaller blogs. OR people only link to those with whom they agree. It’s also a two-way street: a blog can link a lot to blogs and they never link to the other blog that linked to them. Linking for the sake of linking is not the idea. The idea is to help readers find good content elsewhere — and good content can mean another viewpoint that is well-packaged. Some bloggers give up because they can’t expand their readerships. If people who find good content share good content that they find, readers AND writers benefit.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.