Who links to Kairos? Around the same time that I first started investigating our readership, I attempted to find and categorize all of the links to the journal from other websites. I simply didn't have the time, then, to investigate the well over 1,000 links -- but I did note that we had been linked to from English and Rhet/Comp department resource lists, libraries, individual course syllabi, other electronic journals, online bibliographies, CVs of the people who have published in or worked on the journal, resource sites for ESL, rhetoric, philosophy, composition, technical writing, and language arts. We can now add blogs and wikis to the list as well, including a link from Wikipedia from the "Computers and Writing" entry.
Doing this kind of research provides some interesting insights as well. When I search for links to Kairos on Google, only 1,110 results are provided. If I do the same search on Altavista, I find 29,500 results. Why the difference? The answer is PageRank -- the system Google uses to determine value. If a link to Kairos shows up on a bibliography of resources that has many links out and few links in (as is the case with most departmental resource pages), the PageRank is too low to show up on Google's results. Thus, when doing research where the results may be particular or local, it's best to triangulate as many resources as possible.
One of my projects for the next year includes collecting and organizing a database of links to Kairos (the journal as a whole) and to webtexts published in Kairos as individual works. Do you link to or cite this journal or any of the works published in it? I'd like to know!
Drop me a line at gotlinks@technorhetoric.net
Citation Network Map - a possible new feature of the journal's new design