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November 28, 2005

Web Site News - The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem Situation

by Ferdinand T Cat

Shortly before Bruce and I left on vacation there was a change in the rules for the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem. Basically, NZ Bear, who runs the system, felt Open Trackback parties were distorting the results, so he implemented a change: inline trackbacks are no longer counted as links.

Open Trackback Parties are a useful form of advertising-- there is a small but real relationship between our participation in parties and our daily readership-- but there is no question part of the attraction was that the open trackbacks increased your inbound link count.

The biggest danger we face is that now the Bear is trying to tune the ecosystem to make it better, he'll be unable to stop and it will become so complicated it ceases to be useful. This is what happened to the U.S. Tax Code, the only difference being that Ecosystem participants can stop using the service without being thrown in jail.

At this very moment, the Ecosystem is being modified again, so there's no telling what tomorrow will bring; however, as far as we can determine from our experiments, the only links that are affected are trackback links between articles on the front page. This means the following techniques still help you rise through the ecosystem here at Conservative Cat.

Blogrolls still work, although that may not last very long. We will continue to test the system and when it looks like it has stabilized, Bruce will update our Ecosystem page with the latest info.

This turn of events does bother me, because under the old system, people were rewarded for linking to each other, and that helped to foster a sense of community and friendship. Long before open trackback parties started, this site had features designed specifically to give people opportunities to rise through the Ecosystem. I'm going to miss being able to do that.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat


# At Mon 1:03 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (1) | More Web Site News

Trackback Pings

» Inside Blogger Stuff from Wigderson Library & Pub
Anyone can click on my ranking to the left and see how my blog is doing according to the Ecosystem. They would notice in the list of links, however, a number of blogs that are not recognized by the Ecosystem as missing from the list. For example, Cha... [Read More]

Tracked on November 29, 2005 11:36 PM

Comments

I am still trying to figure out how pings work. You are one smart kitty Freddy!


Posted by: Gigolo Kitty at November 28, 2005 12:45 AM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

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