Hi, my name is Brad, 5 days ago I made a webring for the first time in over 15 years.
See, the folks on the Indieweb have rediscovered webrings, only being developers they do their ring real high tech. They are talking about a "webring revival." So I besides Webring I found Webringo.com one of the last old school web ring hosts left standing. Once you kick the tumbleweeds away from the door it still actually works, straight out of 1998.
Took me back to Virtual Promote/JimWorld days when there was a whole separate category of subforums devoted to non-search engine traffic including web rings.
So, in a burst of nostalgia, I made a ring. It was kinda fun. At one time I ran a lot of webrings in the science fiction, fantasy and horror field, most started when the search engines still sucked.
I will say one thing about the Indieweb.org folks, they are not at all intimidated by Google. They mostly ignore Google and don't care if they get any traffic from it. They are talented and create their own ways of communicating with at and around the social network silos. Mainly they are talking to each other. Anyway they are unafraid to try new takes on old ideas that we have long abandoned. I wonder if I can sell them on Top Sites?
See one of the problems amongst blogs, especially new blogs, is discovery - getting found. Same old story, Google indexes pretty quick but it takes awhile to start having articles rank if you are doing natural link building. I can see were an old fashioned webring for blogs might help. (We're not talking commercial SEO here or those levels of traffic.)
Hhh, I might make another ring. Just one more...