Bloggers who need bloggers

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and wonder if you're really making a difference and what would the world be like if you weren't in it. This was that kind of morning. When looking to blog, you need content, which means you need awareness of what is going on around you,i.e. context and relevance Some find it with Yahoo news or their favorite feeds or invariably Techcrunch. I realized that I'm starting to use TGB for my own inspiration. Having personally swopped emails with many of our members, I've come to know and respect each one for their opinion and writing style. So this morning, when perusing my TGB widget, I found Mindy's excellent blog on Online Journalism referencing Mediangler, I knew in some small way TheGoodBlogs is making a difference on the blogosphere, connecting not just readers to bloggers but bloggers to bloggers too.

It's tough to do, in a space where new content aggregators pop up everyday. See Mark Evan's post on his dilemma whether to allow another aggregator use his content.. Google arrived when the world was relatively simple, when links were links and blogs were blogs. In part, they helped create the complexity we see today via their Adsense network encouraging people to add pages (many of very little value) in the hopes of making what was portrayed as an easy buck. Syndication is not a new thing, newspapers do it all the time getting news on niches that they would not cover themselves. The Reader's Digest offers bounties on original articles, jokes and what not. But it is the sheer volume and noise that is making digital world a far tougher place to navigate. I would argue that adding another content aggregator is not helping the situation but exacerbating the problem.

One thing is for sure, subscribing to 10-20 feeds and managing them is becoming harder each day. Taking the television paradigm, most people have low attention spans, they need choice, hence the channel flipping habits we see today. I see TheGoodBlogs as your blog television, allowing you to flip channels, getting random content in a particular niche. If you flipped the TGB dial a couple of times, it's hard not to find anything that would grab your attention and quite often, it's a place where you never have been before. We are about discovery rather than directory. Hopefully, the rest of the world will see it that way.