In response to White Males and the Blogosphere, my “blog brother” Michael Bowen wrote:
“In the blogosphere there is a real contingency of patronage. I’m not sure that everyone is so eager to say so, but it’s real. As real as is the term ‘blogosphere’ is the term ‘blogfather’. Ask any blogger of substance, and if they’re honest (and are abetted by a technical clue or two) they’ll know which other blogs send them the most traffic. They will also almost surely know who gave them their big break and under which circumstances that occured. There is not a conspiracy of white male bloggers, and I’d guess all of them would be loathe to admit any such clubbiness, but all popular bloggers belong to a club and none of them are about to delink anytime soon.
Dead White Male Blogs – The Elvis Factor
One way to look at the question of whether or not there is a conspiracy to keep all the goods is what [white male] bloggers do to police themselves. I think they don’t. I know for a fact that there’s a lot of dead linkage out there that nobody really trims, and that this ossifies marketshare. Once popular, always popular. It seems to be a one way function from which few people fall. DenBeste at USS Clueless has over 800 links and he hasn’t blogged regularly for many months. In fact, I’ve been checking his latest post as I write this one and note that he has gotten the equivalent of one week’s Cobb traffic in about 90 minutes. Here are several other dead blogs that still suck up oxygen. (I’m giving Andrew Sullivan a pass)…”
