Crib Ceiling pointed me today in the direction of an article titled "
Blogs to Riches" from the New York Magazine. The article immediately brought to mind something Kent Newsome wrote at the start of the year on "
Why It's Impossible to Build a New Blog in 2006" and my response to Kent which was "
I choose to believe the glass is half full"
Kent's thesis was that successful blogs have one of three things going for them:
1) they got there first and filled an empty space
2) the blog represents a large company which has a ready made audience
3) they get help from established bloggers
Kent went on to make this statement:
I no longer believe you can have a successful blog without a ready made audience. Why? Because, unfortunately, the blogosphere is a closed system. There are too many people who believe they are going to get rich by writing a blog. Once you add the element of money into the equation, the element of competition soon follows. So you get the haves linking to one another (and largely only to one another) and ignoring (or at best tolerating) the have nots, in an effort to boost their status and, perhaps more importantly, protect their shares of the readership pie. Anyone who argues this isn't true hasn't spent much time surfing around the blogosphere.
The article adds some weight to Kent's contention that there is disparity in the blogospere and suggests an explantion for it. The article relies heavily on research by Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University, who looked at linking behaviour on a sample of blogs.
When Shirky sorted the blogs from most linked to least linked and lined them up on a chart, the curve began up high, with the lucky few. But then it quickly fell into a steep dive, flattening off into the distance, where the vast majority of ignored blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and the C-list is simply massive.
Economists and network scientists have a name for Shirky’s curve: a “power-law distribution.” Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s capital, while almost everyone else has little or none.
The power law is dominant because of a quirk of human behavior: When we are asked to decide among a dizzying array of options, we do not act like dispassionate decision-makers, weighing each option on its own merits. Popularity breeds popularity.
“It’s not about moral failings or any sort of psychological thing. People aren’t lazy—they just base their decisions on what other people are doing,” Shirky says. “It’s just social physics. It’s like gravity, one of those forces.”
Kent and I agreed that there is an advantage to being an early adopter and the article supports this with the statement that
first-movers get a crucial leg up in this kind of power-law system.
The article describes three business models for blogging success:
1) The accidental tourist: A lone writer who starts a blog as a mere hobby but then wakes up one day to realize his audience is now as big as a small city newspaper.
2) The record-label approach: Crank out dozens and dozens of sites and hope that one or two will become hits. [The Jason Calcanis model]
3) The boutique approach: a publisher who crafts individual blogs the way Condé Nast crafts magazines—each one carefully aimed at some ineffable, deluxe readership. [The Nick Denton model]
So if all this is true what advice does the article have for the aspiring blogger:
1)Regularity and relentlessness,” says Arianna Huffington. “That’s how you break through the static of the 5,000-channel universe.” What’s more, a blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day—hell, every few minutes—even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience. The A-listers cannot rest on their laurels.
2) “The good news is that it’s still possible to create a top-ranked blog,” says Shirky. “The bad news is, the way to get into the top ten now seems to be public relations.” Just posting witty entries and hoping for traffic won’t do it. You have to actively seek out attention from the press. “That’s how they’re jump-starting the links structure. It’s not organic.”
Having spent a lot of time reading the blogosphere in the last few months I can see more clearly what Kent was saying back at the start of the year and the article backs up what Kent was saying with a splash of psychology.
So what does all this mean for me:
1) Would I like to write a popular blog? Hell, who wouldn't.
2) Do I think my blog will ever be A List? Not if I keep doing what I'm doing. I'm certainly not regular or relentless enough, and my stuff isn't generally what you'd call witty. I'm not about to crank out dozens of blogs, I have enough trouble keeping one blog going.
3) Does it matter if my blog never makes the A List? Nope. I'd like to think that more people are interested in what I have to say than the few visitors I do get, but I don't do this to join the A List. By the way visitors - thanks for stopping by and reading what I have to say!
4) Why do I do this? I do this to take part and because I think I have things to say. I do it because I've met some interesting people and because I've come across interesting insights and I'd like to keep meeting people and continue to be stimulated by what others think. I've discovered lots of software and ideas that I'd never have found otherwise. Some of the things I've found changed my life, some of it made me more productive, some things made me laugh, other things made me sad. Some of it has been uplifting, sometimes it makes me fume. The internet truly is an amazing place.
Tags:
Crib Ceiling,
Kent Newsome,
Blogging,
power law,
A List
