The J-Blogger Community @ TTLB

Many people recently have been asking me about the J-Blogosphere Community that exists at The Truth Laid Bear, especially since we added it to the sidebar here. First, a quick explanation of The Truth Laid Bear (TTLB), which is run by "N.Z. Bear", who started Porkbusters and the TTLB Ecosystem: N.Z. Bear essentially established a website which includes his own blog, and included in it he created the Ecosystem which is a cute/fun way of tracking which blogs get the most links. You can read about it more in his FAQ here. He also tracks "EcoTraffic", or how many hits each blog gets every day. To join TTLB, all you need is a SiteMeter and to go to his site and join, which we recommend. For more about this, please read Mirty's Codescripter post about this from last year. Why is all this important? Well, as I said, we now have a TTLB Community of our own. The Communities are basically groups of bloggers who are part of one, well, community. In this case, that's the J-Blogosphere, and the TTLB Community is run by yours truly. Unfortunately, I haven't yet figured out how to create additional administrators, which means only I can add or remove blogs from the community. One of the advantages in having a community at TTLB is the ability to see the top posts from across the J-Blogosphere. Those posts which many people have linked to will show up at the top - and people generally don't link to a post unless it was pretty good or leads to an interesting discussion.* It also has a listing of recent posts which updates frequently, though for the latest posts one is probably better off with one of the other links in the sidebar. * There is currently a *slight* glitch in that the link totals are supposed to be ranked by links within the community, but they currently are ranked by total links. I've already contacted NZ Bear about it, though he gets bogged down by the number of requests so it may take a while to be changed. The current list of blogs in the Community are made up of the blogrolls of myself and one other J-blogger from about a month ago. This is but a miniscule percentage of all J-blogs, and it would be nice to add as many J-blogs as possible to the listing - whether right or left, English, Spanish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, Australian, whatever. Please check if you are listed, and if you are not, leave a comment here with your blog's name and URL and I will try to add you in the near future. If after a few days you still do not see your blog listed, e-mail me and I will look into it. A number of people have asked if a person must do anything to join the community. The answer is no - we don't want to exclude someone for being unwilling to follow certain protocols or not putting up something on their blog, considering many people prefer to have nothing in their sidebars. However, we would appreciate it if those who are willing would place one of the two J-blogger icons to the right on their blog, and if you can make the icons link to this blog, all the better. [For more about the icons, please read the post by Irina here.] Nobody has to do this, but it would be very nice if you can and are willing. If you are unsure as to how to put the icon in your template, you can read this post; if you still have trouble, feel free to e-mail me. My e-mail address is serandez at verizon dot net (or gmail.com). I will probably wait a few days until there are a large number of blogs and URLs in the comments section, and then it takes a day to show up, so please be patient. We would appreciate it if people would put in not only their own blogs, but also J-blogs that they don't see listed. Thank you all so much for your help in this endeavor. If you can tell others about this post so more people can learn about it, that would much appreciated as well. Thanks again! NOTE: We reserve the right to remove any blog from the community at any time, particularly if they commit actions which are designed to take advantage of the linking system or for threatening to harm or "out" another blogger.