Rob picked up on the coincidence of several bloggers, all within a short span of time, choosing to “prune” their blogroll and how we all received a rash of nasty mail from folks offended by the thought that their blogs may be dropped. Rob called it the politics of blogging”.

The phrase struck me as particularly apt in that I do believe there is some self-governing aspects involved in links going from one blog to another, as well as internal conflicts between people engaged in similar activities. Now that I’ve spent most of the morning and part of the early afternoon mulling over this notion (and toning down my reply emails to the whiners who wrote to complain about being removed from my blogroll), I’ve reached the conclusion that the “politics of blogging,” like all politics, arises from a clash of philosophies. In this case, the metaphysics of blogging.

We all know of the split between “thinkers” and “linkers,” those who provide links combined with their own original analysis versus those who provide links to others’ analysis with few original thoughts of their own. But this distinction deals with a blogger’s style: how the blogger performs on his own blog, which is really the “small picture” in blogging.

A blogger’s philosophy of blogging, on the other hand, deals with the “bigger picture”: the purpose of blogging and, by extension, the meaning of a link. For the most part, I’ve decided that there are three basic philosophies of blogging: iso-blogging, extra-blogging, and intra-blogging.

The isobloggers are easy enough to define: they are either diarists, or bloggers who haven’t caught on to the relationship between interaction with other blogs and the acquisition of readers. At the not-safe-for-work ErosBlog, Bacchus calls them “cul de sacs”, another apt phrase. Content to blog in relative anonymity, isoblogs tend to be short-lived once the writer inevitably realizes that nobody is reading their stuff. (Nevermind that nobody can find it and, half the time, once found it’s not worth reading.)

Then there are the extra-bloggers, both the “thinker” and the “linker” types. These folks look to the “big picture” of the web as a whole, with blogs being just one source of information in the massive glut of resources on the web. “Thinkers” running this type of blog tend to link to other blogs by targeting a specific post. If they bother with a blogroll at all, they keep the list limited to ten or fewer sites that they personally visit on a regular basis. Phillip Coons is a good example.

The “linkers” among the extra-bloggers have made it their goal to discover and share links to places they’ve discovered which might not otherwise come to their readers’ attention. These folks have a blogroll – sometimes a very lengthy one – but the meat in their posts come from non-blog sources. The truly orthodox web logger falls in this category: those skinless sites that often feature streamlined “link dump” posts in which the link titles themselves are the content and the blogger provides little to no additional commentary. A less-extreme example is Doc Searls‘ site.

Finally, there are the “intra-bloggers,” the group in which those who are good are very, very good, and those who are bad are abhorrent. It is with this group that Rob’s phrase “the politics of blogging” seems most apt, because here is where not only the internal conflicts between bloggers most often arise, but also where blogovution mercilessly illustrates the survival of the fittest.

There are certainly “thinkers” in this group: Stephen Green’s VodkaPundit being an obvious example. For the most part, Stephen’s blog consists of his own analysis, with a link added almost as an after-thought to the web site or blog that served as his source of information. His blog is almost always a “hard read,” meaning you can’t plan on spending just 5 minutes and being fully caught up. He is also one of the biggest dogs out there.

There are those I think of as “love” linkers, folks who blog for social interaction – they link to people they want to be friends with, and they interpret a link back as a sign of “friendship” and validation. Like isobloggers, their blogs tend to be short-lived when they realize that nobody else is reading them. Or worse: when they see one of their friends blogs transform into something more meaningful. One day, their friend gets links from elsewhere and not far down the road their “friend” stops linking to them. Sometime later, they stop blogging and blame it on a “clique” which excluded them.

Then there are the “Let’s (Blog) Roll linkers”, those who blog because they think they’re getting in on the “cutting edge.” (Translation: they are the type that think “trendy” is “cool.”) Invariably, you will find three things simultaneously existing on their page: (1) Their enormously long blogrolls will sport an overwhelming number of “A-list” bloggers; (2) their posts will almost exclusively cite those A-list bloggers with precious little original thought on their own part; and (3) if you run them through Technocrati or look them up on the Blogosphere Ecosystem you’ll find virtually nobody links back to them, “A-list” or otherwise. They, too, are mercifully short-lived.

Yes, I know, this definition excludes the ultimate “linker”: Instapundit, who focuses primarily on other blogs with only a rare bit of original analysis. Here’s a news flash: Glenn is in a class of his own. He invented the blog-linking phenomenon, and the number of blogs that have bit the dust trying to emulate him is a perfect example of “blogovution”: folks who can’t even come up with an original approach are short-lived, too.

So what does this have to do with my ranting about people who bitched when I said I was pruning my blogroll?

Quite simply this: the whiny emails came exclusively from intra-blogging linkers who don’t get that I share a trait in common with every person who reads blogs:

If I want to read Phillip or Doc or Stephen or Glenn, I will. (And I do.) I don’t need you to hunt down scraps from the big dogs for me. If you want to be a linker, fine, nobody can stop you. But you’d better have something original: the discovery of a site or blog that nobody else has paid much attention to yet; a particularly brilliant post from some other blogger that you want to cite but add your own thoughts to; or (horror!) an entirely link-free entry of your own that shows you are capable of thinking for yourself.

If you want to be linked, be worthy of being linked:

•Contribute something original;
•Say something original;
•And damn it, make your site accessible with good layout, easy to read fonts, a reliable host, working links and working permalinks in the event someone, like me, wants to send some traffic your way.

If that’s too hard for you to do – or if you’re just not good at it – then put your blog away before somebody gets hurt. But don’t you DARE blame me – or any other blogger – for not taking your blog seriously when you clearly aren’t serious about blogging.