Although the point about talking about blogrolls (and I keep stressing this) isn’t about rankings but human beings, giving newcomers a whistle-stop tour of some of our blogs before landing them in libdemblogs.

Far more important to have an actual blogroll in terms of building up PageRank. I’ve got one, it’s deliberately small as too many external links devalue each link, I’ll update my link here later.

Liberal England (straight into the charts at 2nd) does have a blogroll, and me at 11 also has one–Jennie doesn’t for a few reasons, partally as the nature of her URL would make it less efective and the limitations a free account has at Livejournal.

However, my stupidly high placing in the Wikio rankings is partially a result of the algorithm they use, and I’ve been sort of playing around with it to see if my suspecions are correct, and they are. I’ll write it up later, but essentially it’s inline links that matter.

I think part of our problem as a bunch of bloggers is we’re very inclined to comment and have longer comment threads, Wikio rewards people who write posts at their own blog and link back–sort of the way you sometimes reply to comments in a new post, but an ongoing conversation between different bloggers on their own blogs.

If we can start doing that sort of thing more regularly, then we should start shooting up, we’ve got a solid core of high placed blogs that can link and boost the rankings quickly.

Also, if anyone wants to know what blogs I read they only have to look at my LJ profile to fins the (rather long) list.

I would say that for newcomers to the world of political blogging, Blog Rolls are *the* way to find other blogs that you might like.

For more experienced bloggers and blog readers, they’re much less important.

The Libertarian party has also massively increased it’s visibility by doing something similar, while the BNP is forced to link to themselves because nobody else will.

The liberal and LibDem blogosphere is typically much more open-minded as we try to engage with a wider spectrum of thought rather than preaching to the converted, but it’s certainly true that we also need to build a more coherent party environment to give a greater feeling of inclusivity.

PS Mark Reckons is a Berkshire boy, so I hope he won’t mind me telling you – his name is Thompson.

No, it’s not my surname. It’s a reference to the fact that I post what I reckon about stuff on my blog.

My full name is Mark Thompson but I am not the DG of the BBC.

fixed the href in your comment btw