One man's trash is another man's treasure

Currently, our commitment to TheGoodBlogs definitely keeps us up at night. Not only from the perspective of rolling out features a mile long in record time but rather living up to our name. Mark Evans and others have asked the question, "how do you know you are circulating the good blogs?" Anytime, we exert some editorial control, we effectively become the censors of the blogosphere. Failure to do so also means we let in a floodgate of blogs that may not be relevant to a particular reader.

In reality there are two perspectives, for the blogger, quality is the issue, to ensure that he is putting his name to a list he approves. For the reader it is about relevancy, reading something that he or she finds interesting. The problem with quality is that it is subjective like driving an American muscle car instead of a European one or wearing Gucci instead of Gap. The problem with relevancy is you need to understand reading habits. Amazon, does this well analyzing buying habits because they can correlate purchases, pretty much putting your money where your mouth is. We have a harder time figuring out if a reader sent by TheGoodBlogs liked something he read. Polls or opinions are rarely answered making the statistics not representative.

Having run the program for over 10 days now, it is yielding some interesting data. The most encouraging is that people do find TheGoodBlogs relevant and the number of people clicking through to other good blogs is equal or better than many ad campaigns. The real question is what are the click through characteristics of other domains and other communities. That is the exciting challenge that lies ahead. Nevertheless, I am convinced that when a reader arrives on your blog, many do wonder what to do next after reading your well-crafted message. Especially if there was nothing new. That is where TheGoodBlogs comes in.