Featured Blogs

This may sound petty, but to me it's very important, possibly ultimately so. 

What I do is write about chess.  I spend dozens of hours weekly preparing articles to publish on my blog at chess.com.  While I play, learn and interact peripherally, my raison d'etre for being here is to write, and by extention, to be read or, at least, to be exposed to being read.  I choose to use blogs as my medium. Because of this, I pay very, very close daily attention to the featured bloggers.  I am perfectly satisfied with sharing the featured status with everyone on an equitable basis, but for the past three days I've noticed a very disconcerting trend.  I submitted an article 4 days ago, on Feb. 28 and, although I check quite often while I'm online, I only saw it featured a couple of times on the 28th and not once since then.  ----in fact, and this it the trend that concerns me - not once in the past three days have I seen a blog featured by any non-titled member.  Can this be coincidental?  I have trouble subscribing to that.  So, what then is the explanation?

The good of the body is the prime directive.

I don't know what that means.

The entire day today so far has featured only titled players. 

I am new here, so am not quite sure what you mean by featured. I checked your blog, and it was on one of my personal favorite players. Paul Morphy, and of course his life long friend. It made my eyes water. Very nicely done.

Just ignore him (he probably believes in Landru).

I always look forward to your well-researched posts, batgirl. I don't know how they determine which blogs to feature on the site. Most other blogs really aren't that interesting.

I hope the trend changes. Being a titled player may lend itself to better analysis of moves, but being good at chess does not mean being capable of artful writing, or the ability and willingness to do research. There should be some kind of balance between blogs featuring analysis by titled players and other blogs that zero in on other fascinating aspects of chess culture, history, etc.

Batgirl's blogs are the ones I read most often.

Good news batgirl check out the current featured blogs 

we haven't changed anything. maybe just more titled players blogging??

I'm curious, how do blogs get "featured" in the first place?  Is it a manual process (curated)?, automated based on readership?  Completely random?

It seems Erik is right (as if he wouldn't be) that the dominance of featured positions by titled players must be from some sudden influx of titledplayers who have decided to blog.  It's really weird to see nothing but IMs, FMs and GMs in the featured blog rotation (which, I think, is automatic using some arcane algorythm).  Thanks everyone for your nice responses.

Someone told me it was viewership.

I've noticed this before, that batgirl's blog wasn't among the featured blogs, so I did a member search and went to her blog directly, which is how I now track her posts.  It's a can't-miss system.  And while I do supremely value the instructional aspect of this site, I also love the culture and history of chess, and batgirl is the best at delivering the obscure, retrieving the little-known, and rescuing the forgotten.  She's a GM of chess culture in my book, and I feel that the staff is doing themselves a disservice in not offering her a paid position here.  Oh, and thanks for the game, too.