Linkage Harvest

Herewith, dear reader, practical hints for turning up interesting stuff on the Web, with a sample of the findings.

Here’s the trick: start a weblog and get a few people reading it. Then, once a day or so, after reassuring yourself that you’re just doing this for its own sake and it really doesn’t matter how popular you are, skip over to Technorati and see who’s pointing at you. I wonder if there are any bloggers so inured to their traffic that they don’t take that Technorati glance once per day. On which subject I must say that if you care about building traffic, few things do it better than getting flamed every day by Dave Winer. It says here that ongoing is in the Top Ten Canadian blogs. Excellent, eh? Hey, Vancouver is way over-represented on that list; excellent again!

Anyhow, one of the nice things that happens is when you look at the list of people pointing to you, some of them look interesting, and if you click on them, some of them are interesting! Here are some that I think are interesting:

• Ad Usum Delphinorum, by “miladus,” is en Français; it regularly has lots of pictures and some really lovely quotations, often in translation from old Middle Eastern sources.

• Sender Traumwind, by Martin Spernau, is from Germany but mostly in English. Mostly, I just like the name Sender Traumwind, which sounds evocative and dreamy to my Anglophone ear; please nobody write and tell me it means “fish guts.”

• this is aaronland, by Aaron Straup Cope, has a nice layout and whacked-out typography and I like its Canadian feel.

• I’ve already mentioned Sean Boisen’s blogos; while I don’t share his theology, it’s a nice-looking place and he regularly does heroic feats of hypertext, concordancing, and statistics on substantial texts; in his case, Christian scripture. Anyone who graphs proper noun frequencies from the New Testament to illustrate Zipf’s law is OK by me.

• Antipixel, by Jeremy Hadley, comes all the way from Japan and resonates strongly with me; he cares about Tufte and Tokyo and photography and a good laugh (trust me, read this one).

  The link that caught my attention is in a nice little story of web-circularity; this link closes the circle, I think.