Blogroll amnesty day. The 1st anniversary edition

Jon Swift, our conservative friend, from across the longest defended undefended border in the world, baked that cake.

He and Skippy are spearheading a celebration of sorts. We're all holding up our blogrolls to show "Duncan" how it's done.

Last year, sometime around this date, one of the "A" list bloggers decided to do something he called "blogroll amnesty". What that entailed was a bloodletting where a lot of smaller blogs on his blogroll were consigned to the trash bin.

It was not an amnesty. Not by any definition anyone else could come up with anyway.

So, blogtopia (a term coined by Skippy) got up on its hind quarters and started to howl. It was to no avail as the A-listers performed a merciless culling of their blogrolls.

It didn't take long for the non-A-listers to respond. The result was a real blogroll amnesty.

The long and short of it is that many of us opened our blogrolls. Instead of shrinking them, we went the other way. And we linked to smaller blogs in an effort to give them a little more exposure, perhaps the odd visit from our regular readers and an all important link which improves their ranking in some of the various link-counters, including Google.

We have a fairly liberal blogroll policy here. If you link to us, we'll generally link back. The only thing we ask is that your blog is active. And we do have other exceptions. If we find your content odious, (and that decision is ours; not yours), you won't find a place on the roll, and you won't get an explanation. (I know. We're just a bunch of fucking meanies.)

We do, however, fail to pick up on a lot of blogs which are linked to us which we should be linking back to. If you're one of them, we need to know, because we have found the best blogs and some great material just that way.

I'm going to ask a little favour though. I'm at the wrong end of several security layers and thready connections. So, while I will ask you, if you are linked to us and we haven't yet linked back, to post your link in comments. And I may have to ask once again after mid-February when my connections will be cleaner.

Oh, and Duncan... Markos... we gotchyer amnesty right here!