2000 Roots of All Evil

A few days ago, I run into an article named 2000 bloggers. It was Tino Buntic’s project of giving blogosphere a face. Actually, not to the whole blogosphere, made out of 55 million blogs, but to a representative sample of it: 2000 bloggers, the first ones who join the project. I liked the idea and I joined, just to see who the others are, to discover some new blogs, or to make new friends. The list was impressive, I found there many bloggers I appreciate and I currently read.

Then, one after the other, the 2000 bloggers started to post on their blogs the full picture of the blogosphere, together with the 2000 links to the participants.

I never thought that an explosion of links would follow, and our blogs would get linked so many times, that we climbed the Technorati tower of links at an incredible speed, making everybody dizzy. So, in order to cure the dizziness, the Technorati team decided to put an end to this game. So did Tino Buntic, who announced on the 2000 bloggers main page the end of his project.

I started this post with the intention to post the big picture myself, but first thing I encountered on Technorati was this Game Over announcement, therefore my article took another turn.

Some people think that these links were not deserved. Maybe not, and I imagine that the mess created in Technorati’s backyard was not a pleasure, as they risk their rank credibility. I understand and I respect the opinion of Jeremiah Owyang and Zoli Erdos, as specialists in internet marketing.

Nevertheless, I have one thing to say: the links were fully deserved by each of the 2000 participants, because they did something that the other 54,998,000 bloggers did not: they put a photo of themselves on their blogs and sent the link to Tino Buntic. If this is not OK, then all the link contests, all paid reviews, all paid text links, and all links gained as the result of Top Commenters WordPress plugin should be disregarded as well, because they also don’t reflect the reality. Why are all these methods OK? Because they did not get as viral as Tino Buntic’s idea got. Because they passed more or less unnoticed by most of us.

Anyway, I have an idea, which I’m going to put in practice over the next few days: I’ll add to Technorati favourites all the 2000 bloggers in Tino Buntic’s list. Some of them were already amongst my favourites, some others I’m very happy I discovered with this occasion, and I was going to add them anyway.

What if all the other 1999 bloggers had the same idea? Maybe John Chow is not the only root of all evil. Maybe evil has 2000 roots.