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Is there a horsey blogging community?
Don’t you find blogs absolutely fascinating? I mean in a theoretical or philosophical or some other sort of -ical way?
Blogger A has a blog. They post something interesting. Blogger B reads it and comments on it, leaving the link to their blog as well. Blogger A reads Blogger B’s blog, and leaves a comment there–maybe because they found Blogger B’s blog to be interesting, and maybe to be polite. It’s hard to tell, and so Blogger A and Blogger B enter into a weird courtship ritual, making careful advances onto each others’ blogs to see if they are welcome and, more importantly, if they can be Best Friends Forever. Or at least add each other to their blogrolls, which amounts to the same thing.
Meanwhile, Blogger C, who reads Blogger A’s blog quite often, saw the comment by Blogger B and thought Blogger B sounded interesting. Or maybe Blogger C was just bored and looking for new sites to read. Whatever–Blogger C visits Blogger B. Now, Blogger A and Blogger C already have each other on their blogrolls, but Blogger C and Blogger B have to go through the courting ritual to see if they will fit on each others’ blogrolls.
Eventually, you wind up with blogrolls that are reminiscent of webrings–many of the same sites linking to each other. This is not a bad thing–it means a group of bloggers are interested in the same topics (or different topics but similar writing styles, or some other common theme). It’s an informal sort of community. Unlike a webring, however, it isn’t a closed system or mutually inclusive–no one is requiring Blogger C to link to Blogger B, and Blogger C might decide not to. For whatever reason. Meanwhile, Blogger B can link to Blogger C all s/he wants. And Blogger B can link to Blogger D, too, even though no one else in this hypothetical community would dream of linking to Blogger D because Blogger D talks about building houses out of lint, and the rest of the community is interested in writing magnetic poetry. But Blogger D is Blogger’s B real friend, so…
What it all means is that IF there is a blogging community, it’s a fluid one. And I’d say–although I’m certainly not a sociology expert. Heck, I’m not even a sociology enthusiast. I’m surprised I can spell sociology–I’d say blogrolls do a fairly decent job of mimicking real-life friendship/aquaintanceship circles. In fact, I know there’s some sort of system in place to classify the various links on blogrolls (to designate whether a link is someone you know/have met, someone you’re related to, someone you work with, someone this, something that, etc). It’s much the same as acknowledging that you and CoWorker A both know CoWorker B because CoWorker B is, naturally, a CoWorker. But while you and CoWorker A might also know BowlingFiend D from the bowling league you both happened to join, neither of you have any interest in meeting CoWorker B’s great-aunt Edna. But CoWorker B loves Edna dearly, and you can’t fault him/her for that.
All of which leads me to my original question: Is there such a thing as A (i.e. one) horsey blogging community? Or are there simply pockets of horsey bloggers here and there on the web? And if there are only pockets here and there, should there be a larger horsey community, i.e. a place where we could find other horsey bloggers more easily? Or do we all have enough reading/writing to do as it is, without trying to keep up with everyone else as well?
Or to put the question another (and more personal) way–assuming anyone made it this far through the post: how important to YOU is the communal aspect of blogging? Do you even think about the relationships between blogs? If you write a blog, does it matter to you if anyone reads it? If you read blogs, do you comment or just watch from a distance? Why? (”Why” to any of those questions, really, although I imagine if you watch from a distance you’ll keep watching and won’t answer. Heh.)
And whether you read or write, do you find you’re reading and writing mostly horsey-themed stuff, or are you more ecclectic? Or do you find you might write mostly one thing (i.e. a horsey blog) but read more widely? Or vice versa? And, again, why?
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Comments
Yeah, I’m surprised so. The closest I’ve found is Bridlepath, which has probably the longest list of horse-related blogs I’ve seen.
Experiments in Training Equines had a post recently about an unofficial web ring sort of thing. She’s got a decently long list of horse blogs, too.
Long blog rolls are a start, at least. (And that sentence makes me laugh, because my links page is so short and yet I moan about the lack of community. Think I might be part of the problem? Ha!)
If we decided to be a community, we could just put the community name or motto on the blog templates and always be searchable through Google.
I think the long blogrolls are actually a problem. They take a lot of maintenance and they are never up to date.
Yrs,
Patricia
Experiments in Equine Training
Hey! So can we arbitrarily declare ourselves a community and come up with an acronym-ish name? And make anyone who wants to join us go through an initiation? It’ll be an electronic sorority house. ha!
But seriously—I’m not a huge fan of blogrolls, really, but right now they are useful because they’re the best source of new blogs that I can find.
Which reminds me—I should email you. I have something that might be helpful, although it would take some tweaking.
On Dec 7, 2006, Rachel said:
Funny enough I happened upon your blog while checking to see if Technorati could answer this exact same question for me…going through horse withdrawl (almost 3 years later) will lead you to do things like this at 10:20am on a Thursday…so far I haven’t found much of a community happening around horses or dressage in the blog world…
Very cool, I’ll definitely be back to see how the 12 month plan goes (good luck!).
Rachel