I don’t think the A list aversions / incestuous linking patterns are easy to generalize about but no, I don’t hink it’s as much a concern about association with other blogs as it is a “selfish” protection of links as web currency. I Although I’m a pretty good “linking out” guy I even see myself drawn into this when I link to other sites, sometimes thinking “Hey, what have they ever done for ME?”

Is the linking situation becoming akin to the ‘not wanting to be a member of any club that would have me as a member’? Applying to a “fall back” college can be a death knell for getting into Harvard, is the same way with the A list blogs?
Can a technology blogger form a Nigerian Banking site and link to his technology blogging competitors so as to down-rank them with Google?

Often a search term will appear but the blog entry is a very small pat of butter spread very thinly or even it can turn out to be an ever smaller pat of margarine spread even more thinly! Ofcourse, sometimes that can be satisfying to some. I sometimes think that the B list and the D list would be better: Brevity and Directness. Ofcourse, my posts would make neither list!!

The Technorati top 100 is sometimes used as a “proxy” for the elusive “A list”, and I should point out that people like Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington – clear “A list bloggers”, blog like maniacs and help move the tech world along at its dizzying pace.

Hi Gabe – touche! I’m emailing Cutts to tell him this new flaw in my feeble attempt to reverse engineer your techmeme algorithm. Keep up the good work dude!

Actually, I posted about Johnson’s article last night before it had appeared on Techmeme or otherwise become any sort of bandwagon.