It's a good faith world online

I think that, desptie the “cesspools” that often crop up in totally open arenas, the internet, especially the newer blog-related community, is a very open and self-bolstering society. It’s kind of a good faith world.

One of the really cool things about the blogosphere is that you don’t hurt yourself by helping others. In the old world, with things like Newspaper circulation, if you told your readers about a cool new newspaper, chances are you’d lose a few subscriptions to your competitor.

The blogosphere? Not true anymore. I can tell you all to go check out my friend Ben’s awesome new blog (but not in IE!), and I don’t think anyone’s going to stop reading mine just because they’ve started reading his. (This assumes, of course, that anyone’s reading my site in the first place. But we’ll just gloss over that for the moment).

Today I set about signing my new gaming blog Flicker up for basically every blog directory I can find - basically I figure hey, we get a link, they get a listing, and someone may actually find a blog they’re looking for. It never hurts. In the process, a bunch of the sites gave me a little chicklet to stick up on our site - which I’m going to do as soon as I get a chance to update our sidebar.

I think it’s a good community type of thing. It doesn’t hurt us, and it’s a nice thing to do. You scratch my back I’ll scratch yours.

One directory, however, which I’m not going to name or link to, requires, as a condition for being listed, that you either paypal them $10 bucks or provide them with a url where you’ve linked to their directory. I think that’s incredibly presumptuous - that their directory is so important (it’s really not) as to be worth $10.

In the days of yore, you paid for listings. In the days of now - you volunteer the help. I’d have linked to them if they listed me. But for some reason it irks me that they make it a policy to only list linking or paid blogs. Is that bad?