Cephalogenic

or, stuff that I dragged out of my head

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Location: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Rollover

First of all, you have to go read the latest entry on "Go Fug Yourself", which is right here in a permalink. It's spectacularly cruel, which means it's hilarious. A fashion advice column written by Courtney Love, containing a letter by Britney Spears? I'm there.

You should be reading "Go Fug Yourself" all the time, at least once a week, which is why it's there to the left. All the links over there are for blogs and websites I rely on; they're not just for blogrolling, which wouldn't work for me anyway because I know who they are but who knows who I am? (I'm speaking to an audience of--what, ten? Fifteen? But it keeps me off the streets.)

So; do you know what blogrolling is? My spell-checker doesn't, but I do. It's like the blog version of logrolling. Do you know what logrolling is? The original modern sense of it is political, referring to the swapping of votes to enact one-sided legislation: Congressman A will vote for Congressman B's bill opening a few new military bases in his home state if Congressman B votes for Congressman A's bill raising farm subsidies in his home state. (And that name came from the practice of neighbours' helping clear one another's land by removing logs; like an Amish barn-raising in reverse.) Over time it came to mean certain kinds of quid-pro-quo favour, particularly the exchange of gushing praise as practised by authors--"I'll crank out a fawning quote for the front cover of your book if you'll crank out et cetera." (The late, lamented late-eighties/early-nineties "Spy" magazine had a regular feature called "Logrolling In Our Time" which consisted of nothing but pairs of such mutually back-scratching quotes.) Blogrolling, therefore--clever coinage--refers to the practice of similarly listing other people's blogs on your blog in the hopes that they'll return the favour.

Which I don't do. Yet, anyway. Check back in a year and see if I still have any integrity.

Update: And then there's the opposite of blogrolling: piggybacking on other people's blogs by inserting ads into their comments, presumably in the hope that these ads will be cached by Google. Today's initial posting was made at 7:11 p.m. local time, and by 7:14 I had two of these irritants. Not that it will change anything, but anyone who puts a link to a money-making site in my comments is going to have that comment deleted immediately. There have to be better ways to make money than to feign interest--"I love your blog!", they all say--and then parasitically insert your URL into the comment box. Douchebags.

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