Referee Me

Those among you who are slightly more versed in Bloggish will alredy understand about referring links, but for those who don't here's a brief explanation. Your blog has become a referring link if someone clicks through from it to another site, in particular another blog. One of the reasons bloggers tend to have lists of links or "blogrolls" on their front pages, is precisely to ensure that there's click through traffic to other sites, which they hope will be reciprocated by the recipients linking back. This has all sorts of beneficial effects on things like search engine rankings, and is for instance one of the reasons why if you type "Shiraz Socialist" into Google, we emerge as the top-ranked link.

Right, that's enough of the technical shite.

I've been interested of late to see how good a referring link we are. And it seems we're not too bad. Kit has us as his second biggest referring link, ranking behind the Stroppies but, astoundingly, ahead of Dave Osler. Which says something about the intellectual standards of the readerships of our respective sites. On the positive side, it could be that they're so glued to Dave's articulate and interesting writing that they can't be arsed to click onwards to another site... or else they just come away spoiling for more after reading my and Denham's incohate rantings. Either way thanks Kit, that's interesting to know.

Yet even this pales into insignificance compared to our other recent ranking. We're also apparently the second-biggest referring link to Luke Akehurst's Blog (although he says he doesn't know who we are - arsehole). In a beautifully surreal loss of my grip on reality, I found out that among Luke's referring links, we rank just behind a site which appears to be moaning about the Clissold Leisure Centre in Stoke Newington. I kid you not, look for yourself: I've never been there but the place must be a right shithole if it's pissed someone off that much...

In an even more wonderful onset of delirium, Luke has us ranking just ahead of swinging site Touch My Cheeky Bum, whose owner appears to take great offence at being associated with Hackney's answer to Chris Evans:

"I want to make clear that we only surfed your blog by accident because our computer automatically finds ginger people as they are generally what used to be called 'swingers'. Once we realised that the only place you were likely to swing was a gibbet we stopped looking at your site"

And who said the internet was a playground for maladjusted people who just don't fit into the pattern of real life?

I'm off now for the left-wing bloggers' piss up. Will let y'all know if there's anything interesting to report, from shagging to fights to arrests. TTFN.