Actually, no,its not. Because, you see, by being a part of the community, the dkos front page, with its thosands of people looking at it, has linked to my blog.

If you have to choose between 1 link with thosands of people checking it, or 5 links with 10 people who might see it, well, I’ll take the first.

And its not like posting at Dkos precludes people from linking to it – they still can. After all, you did

As for the quality of writing, I must say I remain suprised at what will bring people in, and what they don’t read.

So, how does that translate into page views?

Ultimately, how many people see your stuff is a result of its quality and how many others link to it, and that’s pretty independent of whether or not you’re part of a “community.”

When you post something, your title is on the front page, for some amount of time. This means your title is seen by all those people who are looking at the front page. Now granted, all they see is a title, but sometimes that will get their attention, and its easy for them to get into it and read your post – A great example could be seen by some of my more creative title (which usually came up during the election), like “Does Barack Obama plan to gut human spaceflight?” and “Does Barack Obama’s space debate = Cheney’s energy taskforce?” (you can imagine the responses I got for the 2nd one, but it brought in a lot of readers).

OTOH, for someone to go to transterrestrial mussings, or space politics, they have to KNOW the URL for both of them, or they have to search for them – say what you want about Dkos politics, but at least when it comes to the web page itself, its big enough that major television shows reference it (ala Bill O’Reily and Keith Olbermann).

In short – the homepage of Dkos is heavily trafficed throughout the day (thousands at least, more like hundreds of thousands or even millions), my title for my post will appear on the homepage for some part of the day, therefore, my title by itself will at least be seen by many people per day. And that means they have to at least consider whether they want to click it and read it, or not.

Ferris makes an excellent case for community blogging. If we were to just have our own blogs then we would only attract others who were interested in space. Essentially we would be preaching to the choir. If we want to convince more people that space is relevant and that becoming a spacefaring society is a worthwhile endeavor for humanity, then we have to go where there are larger numbers of people who may not necessarily be interested in space and NASA but would be willing to read the posts. Since one of our fellow bloggers has been posting regularly on Dkos, interest in space seems to have risen. Also, in the last month several space and NASA related stories have made the recommended list which gives the story a higher profile on DKos. I recently posted on NASA Watch the results of a poll from one of those posts that showed that three quarters of the readers supported human space exploration. That result is very encouraging and says that being part of a community blog is a smart policy.

Why? How? What would bring them to your particular blog, among the thousand of other Kos “diaries”?

Interesting, as I see things quite the opposite – being more distinctive also means that you have to work much harder to get traffic to see your points.

Again, for me, it all came down to how to engage the non-space or amatuer space people – a community blog gets you more eyes.

Actually, it’s not at all a factor in whether or not I link to you. I just think you’d be more distinctive if you weren’t just another of thousands of Kos “diaries.”

I would suggest that it has worked out pretty good. My piece in the Space Review earlier this year gives much more detail. But I do think it worked out well

I realize you would be more likely to link to me if I was elsewhere, as might be the case with other people. But as you were already part of the space community, and you weren’t a liberal, you weren’t the target audience.

As for posting more often – I would like to, but I want my pieces to be quality, and not just quickie stuff (which I could do if it was my own blog, yes I know), and time is not always my friend.

It is something I am trying to remedy

Not to argue with you about the rationale, but how has that worked out?

I’ll tell you, for one, that I’d have been more likely to link to you if you weren’t a subblog under Kos. It didn’t stop me from linking, but it did raise the bar…

Of course, you’re also more likely to get links if you post more often, regardless of the URL.