Who will be the next American Blog Idol?

Yesterday, the blogosphere was abuzz with the discussion on why people blog and who cares about the b and c-listers and is the blogosphere really as active as people make it out to be or is it the Hollywood of the Internet where a few actors make an obscene amount of money and the rest work in diners in the hope they will become the next American Blog Idol.

Ultimately, the people will decide who is a good blogger. But good bloggers are not necessarily about quantity of posts or quality of posts. It is about finding the right matches. As they say beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Someone may find a technology blog too boring prefering to get the dirt on where Paris Hilton was last seen. Others enjoy the rantings of a programmer who can't make .Net work on his computer. Check out the newsstand to see how many niche magazines are out there, from classical music to antique watches. To brand the blogger as a single stereotype is where we are all making the mistake. Hence we have a spate of blog aggregators who believe they can find the best blogs. While it is easy to find the first 100, then what? when you get to a thousand, was the first 100 really that good compared to the rest and are they still blogging, and do they remain good?

My observation is that there will always be people so passionate about their craft, work, hobby they will take the time to create content and find people to create communities. These people will continue to labour over their passion over many years and it is their passion that will keep the group going regardless of number. TheGoodBlogs is a terrific way of keeping these small communities connected. Perhaps it is community of photographers sharing their latest pictures or a political party driving a network of blogger supporters. The point is they truly understand their audience. That is where I believe aggregators no matter how well-intentioned will not succeed. They cannot be passionate about 500 categories and they really don't care about the blogger with 10 visits a day. It is no more than the old paradigm of sticking ads on the bulletin board outside the supermarket. TheGoodBlogs in some way tries to be the instant messenger of the Blogosphere. In the coming weeks, we hope that some of these communities will come and test drive TheGoodBlogs and see how we can build a cohesive network of community buzz.

The long tail is an age-old characteristic of nature, akin to the survival of the fittest, we will never eradicate it but it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be irrelevant.