think-if u two work together, u could do great things for us inexperienced bloggers. Bah, i guess some things will never happen.

Let me begin by saying that of course I’m going to present my side if someone should disagree with me. Who wouldn’t? And yes, I do have my opinions so if you want to call that a “pattern” then busted as charged. But does that make me a bad person? I don’t think so, but I guess you just see things differently don’t you (rhetorical question).

As I already stated on my blog I had never intended to start a brouhaha here. But Darren came out with both guns blazing and I responded accordingly.

Look, I’m really trying to be nice here. I respectfully let Darren have the last word on his blog and I said my peace on mine. And that should be the end of it. So please kindly MYB.

I’m not sure what your beef is (and I don’t think you do either) but it’s evident that you are intentionally trying to provoke me into a confrontation. And since you are insisting on being anonymous I’m now having my suspicions that you are not as impartial as you let on, and I suspect that you have been sent here for that very reason.

In summary, I’m trying to tell you nicely that I’m just not interested. But if you insist on mixing it up then please be a man, drop the mask and come on over to my blog and we will continue this conversation. I promise not to delete you, but I do insist that you tell me who you are, the url of your blog and to be civil.

That’s not too much to ask is it. So please kindly (with sugar on top) stop wasting Darren’s bandwidth with this nonsense. How more plain and nice can I be?

Cheers and thank you for your anticipated cooperation!

You glowingly respond to anyone who agrees with you (whether they are anonymous or not I note) and a bun fight emerges with anyone who takes offense or disagrees. I’ve read your last three or so months of archives now and I see that pattern on quite a few of your posts.

I still think you have some really great posts on your blog, but there’s a pattern there that makes me feel uneasy about commenting unless it’s to agree with you.

It is a little ironic actually because you seem to want to make it so clear that you are balanced, up for good robust discussion and all for free speech but most of the time there’s an opinion that you disagree with you seem incapable of seeing another person’s point of view and are quite up for a big confrontation.

But on a more serious vein, let’s just move on from here please. Darren and I have already said our peace and I don’t want to have to keep looking over my shoulder for zingers made behind my back over here.

If anyone has anything to say to me then please by all means take it over to my blog and we can discuss it there, but at least have the courage of your convictions and remove the mask please.

Otherwise let it rest. Thanks.

You call it humor but as someone who is looking in from the outside it comes across as something between grumpiness and jealousy. I will say that you do write some really great posts in the mix of it all but that I think people would take a lot more notice if you stopped focusing so much on the negatives of how others blog, how they don’t acknowledge you and how you are being copied and made more of your posts about blog tips and tools like your title says, you’d probably be linked to and respected a lot more.

Darren, you need to stop taking things personally and understand that other smaller bloggers feel a lot of pain when they feel ignored. Now with a blog of your size (you have a lot of readers looking at your feed counter and sitemeter stats) it must be very hard to give personal attention and links to every reader that you have (made harder by writing about blogging, so all your readers will have blogs and be wishing for a link) but understand that we as small bloggers find it hard to get noticed. I guess you know this already and I don’t know how you can ‘fix’ things, but perhaps this is where Bloke is coming from.

I’m going to stay anonymous with this comment because I don’t feel like I want to be anyone’s target.

Lucky for me, I took several graduate level courses in Gas Dynamics (which is used to figure out the thrust out of rockets) so I can report that, no this isn’t rocket science. I suspect it’s also not brain surgery.

That said: it’s pretty darn clear that Darren’s points are valid.

@Andy who said:
As an example someone who sent a trackback to one of my recent posts has so far received more than 40 visitors to his site from that trackback.

I can honestly report that in the past 3 days, 40 of my 50 unique visits come indirectly from my having left a trackback to your site, which ultimately caused you to visit my fairly new blog and post about mine! (Which led to a stumble I could trace directly to someone coming from your blog.) So, it’s clear your advise to BlogBloke is worthy: leaving trackbacks can, indeed, be an effective strategy to get traffic.

Here’s some advise BlogBloke: It is pointless to try to badger Darren into linking you. This is his blog. He gets to link whomever he wishes to link for whatever reason he wishes to link them. You can hold any opinion you like but Darren gets to have his opinion too.

In the end, if someone doesn’t link you, then ‘dems the breaks. No amount of bellyaching is going to change that. Most grown ups just know this.

If you hope to get a link, write a post commenting on someone’s post (possibly Darrents) and leave a darn trackback. Maybe the person you link will link back. Maybe they won’t. It will all depend on whether that post inspired then to write a post commenting on yours. It’s their choice, not yours.

Of course once you have the traffic it all comes down to content, but you all know that.

@ Andy. I’m familiar with the strengths and weakness of both platforms and I use trackback frequently (btw, Blogger also uses backlink technology).

I’m also in the process of migrating over to Wordpress and I’m happy to report they finally got the kinks out of importing from Blogger. (I could never get that thing to work properly ;-)

But it is not relevant to what I’m discussing here. The problem is not being seen by Darren because clearly he does read me. The problem is being recognized by him and it has absolutely nothing to do with the limitations of technology.

But I do appreciate you trying to mediate. That was thoughtful of you and I also appreciate your terrific comments over at my blog.

Cheers!

I didn’t write the above post because of you – it was because of Rory’s post being on the money for me. It’s as simple as that.

You’re more than welcome to give as much proof as you like – but I stand by what I say and am signing off from this conversation as it’s getting personal and un-constructive.

Sure, I have probably also linked through to Darren a few more times than he has linked through to me, but I have also probably linked through to some of my less prominent readers more times than I have linked to Darren, even though Darren is a much more prominent blogger.

One of the biggest problems for users of Blogger and blogspot is being noticed on anything other than blogger and blogspot blogs.

I only receive 10th of the links Darren does on a daily basis, maybe even less, and I already find Technorati overwhelming.

If I am writing something and want someone to notice my opinion, I make sure I am sending a trackback or pingback.

Wordpress automatically sends a pingback to blogs that use autodiscovery pingback code, but Darren’s blog has that removed, you have to use a trackback URL, and search his blog for the instructions on how to do it (but it is the standard way for Wordpress)

On Blogger you have a few options for sending trackbacks

Haloscan – but that involves a visit to their site
Software that sends trackbacks
A few other sites that can send trackbacks
Using Firefox with a Greasemonkey script so you have trackback built into your blogspot interface.

If your links to various people are noticed more, you end up being linked to more. In addition you end up with more traffic, because people see your trackbacks on the subject, not just the owner of the blog, but also readers.

As an example someone who sent a trackback to one of my recent posts has so far received more than 40 visitors to his site from that trackback. That is significant traffic for most bloggers, actually more than I recently received from a direct link from Techcrunch.

Let me go over this again (very slowly this time and let’s use point form since you are such a fan of it):

1. You discovered Rory via my post earlier this month entitled:

a) Surefire Recipe for Blogging Success: Guaranteed

2. You came to your buddy Leo’s rescue when I was paddling his behind and left a comment or two of your own.

3. Rory himself acknowledged in his comments that until that point you had never visited his blog.

4. The other day I visited Rory’s blog again and left comments that stirred up the pot with respect to the matter that we are now discussing.

6. Shortly thereafter I also wrote a post with a link to Rory’s post entitled Reciprocal Blogging: Its About Stroking Each Other’s Back. (It’s rather ironical all things considered don’t you think.)

7. Today you left a link to this post on Rory’s blog, once coming again to Leo’s rescue that is in direct response to the concerns that I had raised.

8. The stats also demonstrate this.

9. Just follow the road Darren and do I really need to provide a snapshot all things considered?

Golly shucks, this ain’t rocket science and it don’t take no Einstein to figure it out either.

If you will read your confabs again you will see that you have continually contradicted your story. If I had you on the stand in a court of law they would sweep you off the floor after I finished with you. Criminals have been hung with far less evidence and the further you make of this you will be the loser in the end.

I don’t want to appear as a bully here because that was not my intention, but you started it with the tone of your first response and your silly repetitious meanderings about unsubscribing to my newsfeed as if somehow that would crush me.

So be very careful what you wish for. Do you really want me to post more proof that you have not exactly being forthcoming here? Please, for your sake, you can trust me when I say that I can very easily do that but it will prove to be very embarrassing to you. But if it does go any further than this then must accept full responsibility because you asked for it.

But personally I would rather leave it as is because I don’t think any more need be said. And I don’t want to hear any more escuses either that you forgot, or you chose to ignore me because I’m such a “negative” person… or whatever.

All that I wanted was you to admit that you have not been evenhanded in your doling out the links and that you have been “bouncing” off me and intentionally shunning me. That is all I wanted, I know that I have already accomplished what I set out to do so as it now stands I am very satisfied except to say that I am most truly disappointed in you sir.

And next time for your own sake please do not understimate me and assume that I’m a stupid idiot or as gullible as some of your followers are.

Then again you could offer me your apology and promise to stop shunning me. That would be acceptable and you will find me to be most gracious under the circumstances.

Cheers!

You’re a star to say that you don’t have time for blogs that leave you feeling negative. Neither do I. Negativity steals focus and energy. It only breeds more negativity. Postive people make positive things happen. A culture can only serve one group and the other will always fell unappreciated. I learned that from Tom Peters sometime around 1989.

Thanks for a blog I keep coming back to . . . this as I approach the 2nd anniversary of reading your blog.

In terms of you having stats to prove how I found a blog via your blog a couple of weeks ago – then please feel free to share them. I’m fascinated to know how you track your individual readers and what they do when leaving your blog.

I really find it bizarre that you expect a link because I found Rory’s site a few weeks ago via your blog. I’m unsure what to say about that. If I told readers how I came to subscribe to the blogs that are in my feed reader every time I linked to them I’d need extensive notes on every day’s web surfing that I do.

Do you really want me to add a link to the above post that says ‘I might have found Rory’s blog two weeks ago from BlogBloke’?

Do you do this?

If there was something to come clean about here then I’d be happy to do it – but I quite honestly am at a loss as to what that is.

In terms of whether I subscribe to you or not – I was simply explaining why I don’t tend to link to you. It is difficult to link up to blogs that you don’t read.

I’m very sorry that you see my way of blogging as simply a grab at cash from innocent and gullible readers.

While I’ve never hidden the fact that I make money from blogging I attempt to do so by helping my readers in any way that I can. I attempt to provide content that is practically helpful and also inspiring and life giving. While I’m not a perfect blogger and am happy to be critiqued on how I can improve it upsets me when people accuse me of having motivations of taking advantage of others. This leaves me feeling quite sick in the stomach as it’s so not where I’m at.

I’m sorry, but while you might think that I shouldn’t take all this quite so seriously – I take that type of accusation seriously – you’re making it publicly and so I’ll refute it publicly and heartily.

I’m not sure what else to say. Once again we’ve failed to communicate to one another in a way that really got us anywhere. Perhaps it’s time we just agreed to disagree and moved onto getting on with blogging.

The inspiration for this post was over the controversy that I created and you felt the need to once again come to the rescue of your good buddy Leo. The stats prove you ‘discovered’ the author via my previous posts giving poor Leo a spanking that he most suredly deserved.

So your excuses for not linking to me ring hollow and are just that — EXCUSES. Having worked in law I let the facts speak for itself and no amount of revisionism by you can ever change that.

I gave you the opportunity to come clean here but you have failed miserably. For shame.

And since you keep bringing it up, frankly I could not care less if you subscribe to me or not. Obviously I’m not an echo chamber to your liking and unlike yourself I’m not driven to making hords of money off the innocent and gullible.

So let me see.. ah, there it is… done. I no longer subscribe to your politically correct version of the blogosphere either.

Just one parting word of advice Darren — don’t take yourself so seriously because I certainly don’t.

Cheers!

…BB

- this post was a direct response to a great post by Rory. As I say in the post above I think it’s a great companion post to Leo’s – so I linked to it. It had nothing to do with your comments on his post.

- I don’t remember how I first found Rory. It could have been through your blog – but if it was that was weeks ago. Do you think it reasonable that I link to you because I mention a blog that I found via your blog weeks ago on a completely different post?

I’d be interested to know what ’stats’ you would have that would reveal how I found Rory’s blog via your blog.

In terms of my friends and what you write about them – I am totally fine with you speaking your mind and critiquing other bloggers. As long as you don’t mind me speaking mine in your comments – or having the right to react by deciding not to read you any more if I don’t feel like our interactions are healthy.

I’m really sorry that we can’t find much common ground – but I don’t find your blog to be where I’m at right now and so I don’t subscribe to it. This is a decision that blog readers make every day and as bloggers we need to accept it and move on.

I also subscribe to a balanced and transparent blogosphere. I work towards it every day. Somedays I’m more successful at it than others but I do my best as I’m sure you do. I try to show balance in the topic I write about by linking out to a lot of blogs/sites, by providing ‘reader question’ posts where readers can have their say on lots of topics and by using guest posts. Via these means many bloggers have opportunity to have their voice heard and opinions expressed.

I’m not really sure we’re going to resolve anything here – obviously we have different opinions and ideas on what’s happened.

I can honestly say that you did not inspire this post – Rory did. While I may have found his blog via you at some point in the last month I don’t remember the specifics of that. If you had been the reason I’d found his actual post mentioned in this post I’d have linked to you – but I found it via other means.

Let’s take a look at this a little closer shall we. This post was a direct response to my stirring up the pot over at Rory’s blog, but you conveniently left that part out. There is no denying that fact.

In addition, I checked my stats the first time that you noticed Rory’s blog when I took your friend Leo to task for using outside sources and not linking to them. (You should also know that it is proper etiquette to link to sources who inspire our posts regardless if we quote them directly or not). And sure enough, the stats showed that you found him via my blog. Perhaps I should post a snapshot to refresh your memory on that.

With respect to speaking my mind about your friends, so much for freedom of the press. You also seem to have proved my theory that the further we move up the food chain the thinner our skin seems to get. Sad but true.

In my blogosphere, blogging is supposed to be transparent and balanced, enjoining the conversation with all points of view regardless if we are preaching to the choir or not. Otherwise we should all move to Siberia. I hear they are cracking down again on opposing opinions.

As always it’s a pleasure talking to you Darren and I hope we can do it again soon.