Monday, January 02, 2006

What is Linkfest Haven?

A good question. First of all, let me introduce myself. I'm Adam Graham of Adam's Blog. I host one of the longest running Open Trackback/linkfests on the Internet at my blog as well as contributing to the linkfests of others. If you don't know what a linkfest is, click here for an example.

As a linkfest operator, I'm often frustrated by the number of posts I get to my linkfests from other bloggers. The challenge of having a linkfest is that you've got to go and do Trackbacks to other linkfests which can be time consuming to say the least.

I want people who come to my linkfests to be able to visit the other open trackback parties, so they can get as much linkage as possible. However, I often miss the Trackback parties of others, because they too struggle with visibility.

A third frustration is that I run my linkfests over mulitple days: Tuesday and Wednesday and then Friday-Sunday. My posts often dry up quite a bit after the first day as people assume the party's over when I'm really continuing to update the post.

For my own postings on other linkfests, I run into frustration in that I can't find all the Trackback parties out there. Yes, some Blog Rolls tell what days sites hold parties, but oftentimes, I'll want to submit a post BEFORE the other site has set up its party or a site will not have a party on its scheduled day.

Linkfest Haven's goal is to:

1) End frustration for both Linkfest Hosts and Guests
2) Encourage the Growth of the Linkfest as a way of Blog Promotion and Community.

Here's how it will work. Linkfest Haven will be a blog with few "posts". This is the first of four planned pieces of content that will be produced for Linkfest Haven.

After that, each day there'll be a thread of "Today's Linkfests" posted. A linkfests of the day's linkfests, if you will. If you're running a linkfest all you have to do is send a trackback to us using the Haloscan trackback of the day. If your software won't allow you to send a trackback, you may use The Wizbang Standalone Pinger to do so. All I ask is that you link to the main Linkfest Haven page, NOT the post of the day. This way, if you're doing a linkfest that's acccepting trackbacks on multiple days, you just need to go ahead and send a trackback for each day. Users who click on your links weeks or even months later will be able to go and view all the most current linkfests. In addition, by using Linkfest Haven, you'll be able to find links to all of the other linkfests so you can include them in your post.

For bloggers, Linkfest Haven will eventually mean that you can view all of the day's linkfests, go to them one by one and promote your work on as many blogs as possible.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be spreading the word about Linkfest Haven and manually finding and posting links to blogs, as well as getting ahold of the Bloggers to tell them about the serve. I hope to have 15-20 Linkfests onboard by the end of the month. Your support is greatly appreciated.