I stumbled upon an article by Mark Cuban on
blog pimpin. I'm not a fan but it is a good commentary worth reading. He claims self promotion in the Blogosphere is out of control. I think there's an element of truth in that. There is definitely a blogger demographic that exhibits a kind of swarming effect. Find the top story of the day on Techmeme and blog about it. Or simply blog about a celebrity like Mark because he is controversial and he gets googled as much as anyone else. It's not so much that it's wrong to blog about hot topics and celebrities, especially if you have a real opinion. But it's wrong if you're only doing it to get your google ranking and reputation up. That's not the spirit of the blogosphere in my mind. You may find a huge omission of the entertainment category at TheGoodBlogs. We tried. The effort to find 20 good blogs on entertainment is far more difficult than you think. Our short exercise in futility yielded countless blogs that were the same pictures of Paris Hilton, Tom and Kate in Italy, and other celebrity sitings with no interesting information and forget about opinion, there is usually none. A good entertainment blog is hard to find. We will have that category one day but right now it needs a few good blogs.
At TheGoodBlogs we usually don't have the time or the luxury to surf for long periods of time, so keeping an eye on the widget has become my window to the world. I do cherish the long tail. Every day, I learn about what's hot in Web 2.0, being a parent, I laugh and cry with the Moms. I marvel at the pictures at the food blogs and always look to the marketing category for tips and tricks of the seasoned professionals. All in all, it becomes a well-rounded experience, like walking in a tiny unexplored village that has craftsmen and art not found anywhere else, like going from Disney to some quaint Bavarian village. There's beauty in our TGB backyard. While not every blog is going fit my tastes all the time, all the blogs will undoubtedly please me some of the time.
Just lovin' it.
2 Comments:
Couldn't agree more on the echo-chamber issue. Did anyone really have anything more to add on the peanut butter manifesto or the AOL shake-up last week? For me, that's the opposite of what drives me to read a post on someone's blog. I'm looking for new stuff, not W's link to X's comments on why Y was right/wrong about Z. Linking and conversations are great, don't get me wrong, but the Techmeme massive drive me nuts sometimes.
I think techmeme is a great site for techies and so is digg but it's pretty obvious once you get out of that hardcore blogging community there really is no small number of issues that everybody wants to read about or discuss. That's why techmeme and digg work for technical subjects but why memeorandum, netscape, digg, viewvine and all the others struggle when you get to the wider world. Good blogs is the best model so far for how to deliver to a wider audience (though obviously I hope projects like WRIPE.net will also fill a void).
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