| Only if you persist in looking at the blogosphere as a marketplace and blogging as "pushbutton personal publishing." Think of it this way: publishing is newspapers. Newspapers wind up in the cat box or the attic. The content of your blog stores knowledge for retrieval by you, and also faces a public of like-minded people.
For example, is Gizmodo a blog? It has no comments, although you can submit a link for consideration by its editors. It is essentially a publishing enterprise, and one that tends to blur the ethical distinction between advertising and reviewing, I might add.
Those "few friends" are more valuable to you than 10,000 steps on your hit counter, unless your goal in life is to live on Net advertising revenue, in which case, good luck to you. If they help you to do work that other people find useful, then you repay them by including them in the larger social network you've formed with your users. Even more valuable is the Blogmatcher user who sees that you also link to a lot of vibrating flange-related material, comes by to check out your blog, and sees exactly where you need help in the design of your new hypersonic vibrating flange. Your problem is solved because you left it out there in the open for others to think about. You can go on playing your cards close to the vest, as Microsoft does, but you have to weigh the advantages of your proprietary stance against the potential value of open collaboration.
I don't know of any way to quantify the value of that kind of interaction, but it is essential to the value of social networking tools. Open-source programmers have known this for a long time, but I am not sure that the current thread of discussion on social software really confronts it head-on. I have a hard time keeping up with the volume, however ;-).
Take another example: I upgrade to Ryze gold membership so that I can "pivot" when I filter members by, say, "blogging." After I submit my PayPal authorization, I discover that "pivot" does not mean filter by bloggers and then filter bloggers by language, an interest of mine. That's what "pivot" means in my small experience with databases. It means "wander off in another hazily defined direction."
I'm a bit disappointed, because this is not an optimal use of the network. It is not, in fact, much of an improvement over a cocktail party with name tags, except that I can make the rounds a little faster without having to buy people beer.
The same goes for a blog without open interactivity, and a blogosphere that values inbound links far more people with like-minded outbound links. You might as well be sticking flyers on cars at the 7-11.
Technorati, for example, enables you to rank your inbounds by "authority," but just because some flange-genius wannabe gets a lot of hits by linking to and spouting nonsense about flanges does not make him an "authority" on the subject. "Authority" means "popularity" narrowly defined, and does not help you one bit in navigating the rarified social network of cutting-edge flange designers.
Blogging is a social behavior, and there are rules you need to follow in order to get what you need out of it. The best definition of those rules I can think of is the Hispanic Blogger's Creed by a Spanish-speaking blogger named Walter Kobylanski.
You see? I just told you something you didn't know before. I hope it helps.
> Robert Walikis wrote:
> An important post on the topic from Clay Shirky
>
>> Gautam Ghosh wrote:
>> hi folks,
>>
>>Is the world of blogs destined to remain a very tall pyramid, with a handful of blogs that are visited by most and the majority of blogs in the bottom of the pyramid...being visited by none other than the author and a couple of friends?
>>
>>How does a blog create a buzz around it and get linked to 1000s of other blogs and eventually get picked by non-bloggers too?
>>
>>Does the nature of the content disproportionately affect traffic?
>>
>>regards,
>>Gautam Private Reply to Colin Brayton (new win) |
