I seem to have inadvertently stumbled across an easy way to get into the Blogdex Top 25 without actually writing any single post that very many people want to read.
Call it Blogdex BombingTM. The process is quite simple, though it does take time:
1. Start a weblog and keep it up for a few months.
2. Wait until 16-20 people have permalinked it. That's the slow part.
3. Rent a new domain name.
4. When you transfer your blog to the new address, e-mail all the bloggers with permalinks to the old URL and ask them to update them with the new URL. It is unlikely that any will refuse, and most are so obsessively attached to their keyboards that updates will start appearing within the hour. Be sure to e-mail them all on the same day for maximum effect.
It's been just over two days since I switched over to this URL, and results have been impressive. I was #2 on the Blogdex Top 25 yesterday, with a rating of 9.0 (the top site was 10.3). Today I am still #2, with a rating of 16.0, again just missing first place, which went to an actual article in the New York Times ("Google's Toughest Search is for a Business Model", 17.0). I am way ahead of "This Year's Arts Pulitzers", straight from the Pulitzer's mouth (#7, 12.0), not to mention the dork who claims bloggers are war profiteers (#8, 11.0). I will provide no link for him, or for the New York Times, which recently rejected my attempt to register and generally sucks all around anyway. Come to think of it, I don't think much of the Pulitzer Prize, either, or any other prize, for that matter, so I think I'll omit that link, too. Do people really go see movies because some committee says they should? Try your friends, or a reviewer you've found trustworthy in the past. I recommend James Bowman. And I've never understood why anyone would want to watch any kind of award ceremony, but maybe that's just me.
Anyway, here's a disquieting thought: Do I really want to appear in this company? What's so great about being on the Blogdex Top 25? Other than the fact that my hits have doubled since I moved, and roughly one-third of the total are coming from Blogdex . . . perhaps I should be more grateful.
Of course, I didn't plan to link-bomb Blogdex, though it did occur to me, as I sent out my change-of-e-address letters, that this might happen. If I had known for sure that my ruminations would attract an audience, it would obviously have been a lot less trouble for me and my readers and linkers to rent the domain name first so it wouldn't have to move. Then again, if I'd just waited to acquire a few more permalinks before moving, I could have made #1 on the Top 25.
Update: (4/14, 00:35)
I just noticed that John Hiler at MicroContent News posted further thoughts on this subject on Thursday. One line puzzled me at first: "Maybe it will happen less once Blogdex starts weighting blogs by how many people have linked to them." At first I thought, isn't that what BlogDex does, giving me a 16.0 for having 16 blogs linked to me? What he means is that those 16 should be weighted differently from each other, depending on how others many have linked to them. I'm not sure that would have defused my BlogDex Bomb: some of the blogs that link to mine are quite widely-linked themselves. I don't want to drop any names, and don't have to, since anyone who wants to know can look it up on BlogDex. But it would tend to defuse malicious premeditated BlogDex Bombers, who move from one address to another only to appear on the Top 25.