My Stupid Rules About "Intelligent Blogs"

How To Get On The List

How to get on my Intelligent Blogs list is easy, but vague: you just have to strike my fancy. Now that I am not running Site Meter, I am not checking those visitor's URL's anymore, so that's a source of fresh meat denied me at present. I may never return to doing so, because it's more aggravating to be subjected to sellers (spam-visitors, I guess you'd call them) who visit every site on earth just so that some of us will check back, as I was doing.

The only viable way left to get my attention is to send me an email or leave a comment. Make sure you leave me your link and, more than likely, I'll take the bait. I'll visit your site. All the rest is happenstance, hazard, chance—maybe I'll stumble across the next Intelligent Blog on some stranger's blogroll.

How To Fall Off The List

Just as I add blogs in a random, quixotic, and unpredictable manner, it's hard to know when one of them may wear thin, fall short of it's promise and become dull, annoy me, cease to be as well-written, turn out to be too republican or maybe way too born-again. Such duds or disappointments are soon jettisoned.

Another way that blogs gets dumped is that they cease to write at least moderately often—say three posts a week, on average. I use Bloglines to subscribe to more than 30 blogs, so it's no great waste of my time if you don't publish often. I seldom check your blog until Bloglines lets me know you have something new there. But beyond that, whether it's stupid or unfair, I don't feel right recommending blogs that don't keep trying to be entertaining. Bloggers can be lazy toads, I don't mind that, but if you can't maintain a presence for very long, then it will soon seem like you don't want to be there!

Infrequent posting is also a good way to not get on the list; I've started to add A Butterless Man several times because he's entertaining, but he just doesn't post very often. I butter him up when I can and hope it'll make him post more.

Falling In Love With Love

The final thing, possibly not the most sensible, is this, a sort of variation on the old cliché, "Love me, love my dog". In my part of Blogland, it means: "Like my blog, like me!" No, I don't mean you have to come over to my house. But I do mean that you have to eventually show that you have been engaged by my blog, engaged enough to leave a few comments, send a few emails, have a little bantering talk! These "conversations" may be superficial, but I like them! The people who have these brief dialogues with me may be shiftless—how else would they have time to piddle away on me—but I like that, too.

So that's how I fall in love with blogs and bloggers and that's how I fall out of love with them, too. Them's the rules. Do you have any rules, or are you all sweetness and light?

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