I’ve been watching my piddly little message boards here languish unused for months, wondering what the deal is and why folks don’t participate. Well, aside from the obvious (it’s not like I’m famous, so why would folks really bother?), I read an interesting article over at the O’Reilly Network yesterday that may explain why some discussion boards are beginning to falter in light of the blogging phenomenon. In short, most folks would rather comment on their own blogs, where they have a spotlighted voice, rather than participate in a huge discussion board where the signal to noise ratio can get shockingly low. Hell, even I do it. In fact, I just did.

So, as an experiment, I took Steve Mallett’s suggestion and created a “Top Referrers” box on this page. This should give you an idea of who is linking to me and to what degree. The little number in parentheses is how often a visitor has come from that link. It only lists the last 10 referrers at the moment, but I may also create a list for the top referrers down the line. I encourage you to visit the referrers and find out what’s shakin’.

Keep in mind, though, that the box may become flooded with referrer ads. There’s this shockingly annoying ad method going around right now where advertisers put their sites into your referrer logs. It screws up one’s numbers and is a rather ineffective means of advertising. Of course, if more people do what I’m doing here, it may become more useful to these insidious spammers. If you see one of these float up in the box, please don’t click on it. Just write to me and I’ll do something to block it.