del.icio.us links (continued)

mong the sites I wrote about in the previous post, there seems to be a common threshold. If a site can somehow slowly clamber up to having about twenty links to it, then the number of links starts to increase significantly. And how do sites reach that magic number? I don't know - this blog crawled from 0 to 2 after one week then stayed resolutely at that level ever since.

I've tried adding a link at the end of my e-mails (not to everyone - I didn't drag my work e-mails into this), and I've tried leaving comments on other people's blogs (both popular and unknown ones) in the hope that they would reciprocate, like what they saw then add a bookmark.

There are obvious flaws in this approach. I only tagged a few of the blogs I discovered at random and I didn't tell the authors that I had done so. Perhaps it would have encouraged other people if had done so. More fundamentally, perhaps the people I left comments with don't use del.icio.us. Is it sufficiently widespread to warrant the drawing of conclusions?

Perhaps the answer is to develop a focus for the blog, so that people interested in that particular focus would consider it worthwhile to make return visits. That focus might be a topic (like the Animation Archive or Puppet Vision) or it might be a style of writing (like little red boat or Johnny B's private secret diary).

But I don't want to change the way I write, just for the possibility of increasing readership, even though that would be encouraging. At least I've got two links, which is two more than one of Scotlands' principal newspapers.

Tags: del.icio.us | links