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Tuesday, January 31, 2023 10:09 PM >>>


link stats

Sunday,  01/29/23  01:29 PM

Here's a little inside baseball ... my friend Gary recently chided me that I link Powerline too often.  Hmmm... I wondered, really?  I like Powerline and they link interesting stuff, but I don't want to become too one-sided.  Not to mention, if all I did was link one site, that wouldn't be very interesting to you - you could simply link them directly.

[Update: Gary clarified, when I post political things I link Powerline too often.  And other "right" sources.  And I think he's right; as I look at this list, most of the political sites are "on the right".  (It could be argued that many of the "mass media" sites are "on the left", but they are not purely political.  So a) sorry I misrepresented your comment Gary, and b) I'll try not to be such an echo chamber...]

So I did what anyone would do - wrote a script to analyze my links.  Here's the top 100 domains in 22,446 links from 3,443 posts:

domain total 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2020 2022 2023
w-uh.com 2972 320 191 155 49 28 461 456 336 276 1 37 197 201 93 25 32 27 87
feedproxy.google.com 1057 69 302 180 241 37 142 43 20 4 15 3 1
velonews.competitor.com 373 109 100 111 49 4
boingboing.net 360 57 60 30 15 2 10 28 18 10 9 24 42 23 2 19 5 6
wired.com 317 105 66 30 5 1 18 31 17 10 6 8 4 2 2 6 6
engadget.com 283 25 27 5 2 24 52 34 19 6 28 27 25 1 4 4
cnn.com 280 95 91 11 5 1 18 13 5 3 6 14 7 8 1 1 1
velonews.com 238 1 15 4 83 127 3 4 1
nytimes.com 226 56 36 9 3 30 22 16 12 3 9 15 5 2 6 2
kottke.org 216 7 2 2 40 40 30 15 12 25 18 6 3 10 2 4
amazon.com 215 49 33 16 3 24 24 10 3 15 8 21 4 4 1
feeds.feedburner.com 201 21 22 7 4 122 25
radio.weblogs.com 190 120 60 10
youtube.com 173 1 3 22 32 31 38 4 6 10 11 1 10 2 2
powerlineblog.com 167 1 12 8 5 47 39 18 16 1 2 2 10 3 3
pajamasmedia.com 157 60 64 21 12
scripting.com 150 18 6 1 7 2 21 25 21 16 5 15 4 3 2 1 3
facebook.com 149 1 3 6 9 23 41 58 5 1 2
inhabitat.com 149 23 19 22 11 20 21 14 14 2 3
daringfireball.net 147 6 11 4 34 27 28 9 1 11 4 2 4 3 3
google.com 141 19 4 3 9 38 4 13 6 25 13 6 1
techcrunch.com 140 1 21 17 15 9 3 22 31 16 1 4
blogs.law.harvard.edu 122 26 22 1 12 20 10 10 1 10 10
rss.slashdot.org 117 2 2 1 16 30 22 13 7 11 7 6
sports.espn.go.com 116 41 26 4 1 1 29 12 2
gnxp.com 115 58 26 13 1 16 1
economist.com 113 7 10 17 2 1 39 17 3 1 1 1 13 1
americandigest.org 112 9 11 5 1 23 18 12 9 6 9 2 2 3 2
apple.com 112 37 30 10 1 1 13 5 2 5 1 3 2 1 1
en.wikipedia.org 112 2 2 1 2 20 17 10 6 4 11 14 13 5 5
instapundit.com 103 20 33 12 3 1 24 6 4
rss.com.com 99 92 7
salon.com 99 36 10 1 10 5 13 4 2 8 3 1 1 1 4
news.com.com 97 47 32 13 3 2
littlegreenfootballs.com 95 13 22 3 3 2 24 13 6 4 2 2 1
aperio.com 94 11 25 13 5 9 13 3 15
newyorker.com 88 3 1 3 1 20 25 12 6 8 3 3 2 1
news.bbc.co.uk 86 47 16 8 1 7 6 1
tbray.org 86 29 16 4 1 5 6 6 4 1 4 3 1 2 1 3
foxnews.com 84 7 3 24 34 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
althouse.blogspot.com 83 8 2 28 25 9 6 1 1 1 2
feeds.powerlineblog.com 82 10 2 6 11 20 14 5 14
news.cnet.com 82 19 37 13 7 3 3
arstechnica.com 80 2 2 1 1 17 6 3 3 2 10 3 17 4 1 4 4
futurepundit.com 80 7 12 11 2 1 18 12 9 5 2 1
pjmedia.com 75 2 14 21 18 4 13 2 1
thetruthaboutcars.com 74 34 31 3 2 1 2 1
rss.cnn.com 72 21 15 11 5 3 6 6 4 1
eyesfinder.com 71 1 2 40 15 13
laughingsquid.com 71 1 1 13 25 16 6 7 2
twitter.com 71 2 4 6 1 2 1 23 10 22
zooborns.com 70 2 28 19 8 2 7 2 2
dilbert.com 69 1 1 1 4 11 23 13 5 8 1 1
businessweek.com 67 18 7 6 2 12 14 4 1 3
codinghorror.com 65 12 4 1 18 17 8 2 1 2
slate.com 65 1 3 11 14 1 3 6 14 4 5 2 1
cyclingnews.com 64 25 8 10 4 7 6 3 1
gizmodo.com 64 17 15 10 7 2 6 1 1 2 3
pvrblog.com 64 15 31 13 4 1
washingtonpost.com 64 29 8 4 5 1 3 3 7 4
feeds.arstechnica.com 63 2 8 15 12 8 2 7 9
archive.scripting.com 62 9 37 16
denbeste.nu 62 46 14 2
iditarod.com 62 7 11 13 30 1
esr.ibiblio.org 60 2 3 13 10 16 4 5 2 2 3
joelonsoftware.com 58 17 8 7 2 11 5 1 3 2 1 1
spacex.com 56 8 7 8 7 12 1 4 2 4 2 1
alwayson-network.com 55 12 42 1
blogs.wsj.com 51 3 24 6 6 1 8 2 1
collisiondetection.net 51 3 9 13 7 8 3 4 3 1
digg.com 50 3 2 6 1 3 10 16 6 1 2
slashdot.org 49 22 19 4 1 1 1 1
feeds.wired.com 48 8 12 13 12 3
cultofmac.com 47 10 14 7 2 1 3 6 1 1 1 1
parislemon.com 47 3 5 22 14 3
scriptingnews.userland.com 45 45
slate.msn.com 41 14 18 9
horsesmouth.typepad.com 40 4 13 10 6 3 1 1 2
popularmechanics.com 40 11 6 2 5 1 3 5 3 4
blognewsnetwork.com 39 12 27
nasa.tumblr.com 39 4 19 3 11 2
online.wsj.com 38 5 2 11 5 3 9 1 2
silflayhraka.com 38 14 16 7 1
doc.weblogs.com 37 11 21 4 1
latimes.com 36 7 3 2 8 4 1 2 1 3 5
russellbeattie.com 36 3 3 6 2 11 3 4 1 1 2
diveintomark.org 35 9 8 1 1 11 1 3 1
telegraph.co.uk 35 4 1 1 5 13 4 2 3 1 1
ventureblog.com 35 30 4 1
newscientist.com 34 13 7 2 1 1 3 3 4
pandasthumb.org 34 7 7 3 9 5 1 1 1
teslarati.com 34 2 4 9 2 11 3 3
caltriplecrown.com 33 7 26
gigaom.com 33 1 3 1 1 1 5 2 1 10 8
jrobb.mindplex.org 33 19 13 1
story.news.yahoo.com 33 20 12 1
command-post.org 32 7 24 1
rottentomatoes.com 32 1 3 2 4 3 8 7 3 1
xkcd.com 32 1 2 1 3 3 1 4 11 2 4
blog.aperio.com 31 7 4 8 5 1 6

Thoughts on this list:

  • Almost all of those sites still exist.  Whew.  But not all of them.
  • I have started linking to Twitter.  Did not do previously, could not follow.  I predict this will grow a lot.
  • Many links to YouTube.  I used to embed videos, it was hard to do, and the technique kept changing.  I just link now, although it's worse for you; the user experience of visiting YouTube is terrible.
  • Other than linking back here, the second most popular link destination is feedproxy.google.com; those are links to blogs that use Feedburner RSS feeds (acquired by Google in 2007).  I should make sure those links point straight back to the blogs, a project for another day.  Google, argh!
  • Would be interesting (and not that easy) to figure out how many of these links are still valid.  In the old days, you could do an HTTP GET and if you got a 404 status, okay, page is gone.  But many sites (including this one?) simply take you to the home page instead.  You get a page, but not the one you linked.  So there would have to be some logic to compare the linking text to the page to see if a redirection took place.

Some other interesting facts:

  • The post with the most links was "catching up" in 2004, with 228.  I'm sure you clicked all of them.
  • 690 posts have zero links!  Many probably think pieces which were not a reaction to an external link.
  • 509 posts have one link, and 282 have two links.

Cheers and onward!

Comments?