I have been following with interest the progress of Project Bozzo (see also here) on The Columnist Manifesto over the past week. Most likely, you have never heard of Project Bozzo. Tom Bozzo is a Madison economist who decided (with the assistance of Oscar Madison, Jeremy Freese, and others) that he could manipulate his blog's ranking in the TTLB Ecosystem through a linking conspiracy. That was last week, when Bozzo's Marginal Utility was a 10-link "Crawly Amphibian" in the Ecosystem. Today, he is a Large Mammal, thanks in no small part to Jeremy's Herculean "one hundred links of bozzitude."

In the meantime, Conglomerate seems to have been ousted from the Ecosystem since our move to Typepad. After the move, I wrote N.Z. Bear an email, informing him that our url had changed from {http://www.theconglomerate.org/weblogs} to {http://www.theconglomerate.org/}, and the next thing I know, we're gone! It was the Ecosystem's unreliability that casued me to remove the usual link from our site. The more reliable link-tracker is Technorati. (Which, by the way, shows Bozzo's Marginal Utility as having nine unique links ... before this post.)

UPDATE: Tom Bozzo emailed me with the following comment: "while I would tend to agree with you that Technorati is normally a more accurate and more comprehensive link tracker than the TTLB ecosystem -- since Technorati doesn't depend on opting in, as is the case with TTLB -- Technorati is in fact providing an incorrect count of unique sorces of inbound links to my blog.  It is actually linked on 12 blogrolls that I know of, and has another inbound link on the front pages of at least two other sources, including yours." 

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