Mass niches, the long tail dissected

One of the buzz words of the 90's was one-to-one marketing and mass markets. One of our observations is that the Long Tail is really about mass niches. It's an appropriate title but it does make our lives a little more difficult. Bloggers are very protective about their blog and rightly so, they view it as extensions of themselves, it is for many their public personas. Accordingly, they worry about who they promote (although, ironicly, they have absolutely no control who Google promotes in their ads and we've seen some pretty funny stuff because of incorrect interpretations of blog content by Google ads). In reality, two technology bloggers seemingly talking about the same stuff could be two totally different people with different tastes in food, music, clothes etc. So are good blogs about good content or good writing, probably a bit of both. But it is about relevancy.

The key to personal growth I believe is to ensure that your circle isn't subsumed by another circle of interest but intersects with it. So you have something new to bring to the table and so does the other party. Hopefully, that is what TheGoodBlogs can bring, diversity through discovery. Otherwise I think the world would be a pretty boring place if every technology blogger only talked about Techcrunch vs Techcrush. I've learnt long ago, you can't please everyone all of the time, as long as we can please all of the people some of the time, we're doing well. That's one of the reasons, we've not yet gone down the path of bloggers selecting the content they want to promote. For the most part, 90% of your readers are anonymous, it is better to give them a random sample that has some intersection of your interests as a means of driving interest and traffic. As such, we provide a very complementary service to blogrolls, favorites, and other widgets that appear on your blog. The voice of the blogosphere is like a 1000 violins the resulting music is interesting because of each one brings a unique tone not because they all sound the same.

Now, let me make some introductions, to your right of this post, you'll see a couple of great bloggers just wanting to share something interesting. Go on, click on one, you'll never know what the next blog may bring...