John Swift reveals that some of the rich-with-links top leftwing bloggers like Atrios do not practice, blogospherically at least, what they preach.

The idea that links are the capital of the blogosphere seems so obvious that you would think an economist like Atrios of Eschaton would have realized it long ago. And as he is a progressive who has accumulated quite a bit of link wealth, you might also think he would be in favor of redistributing some of that wealth instead of just letting it trickle down. So when he announced last year that he was declaring February 3 Blogroll Amnesty Day, and other bloggers followed suit, I assumed he meant that he was opening his blogroll up to the masses. I sent him a polite email pointing out that his blog was on my blogroll and I would really appreciate it if he would add my blog to his. I never heard back from him.

When February 3 rolled around, many bloggers discovered to their horror that instead of adding new blogs to his blogroll he was throwing many off, including some bloggers who were his longtime friends. Blogroll Amnesty Day, it turned out, was a very Orwellian concept. Instead of granting amnesty to others he was granting amnesty to himself not to feel bad for hurting others feelings.

In my case, my blog roll is my own link collection. Before I was blogging myself, I had blog links bookmarked in my browser by categories. When I took up blogging, I laboriously put in my entire collection of links, and have continually updated it. I’m simply sharing my own working link collection with the world at large. If I think I might wish to return to a blog someday, I add the link.