July 21, 2005
welcome to the flatlands
Robert Scoble says being linked to by an A-Lister ain’t what it used to be.
Weather forces are constantly wearing down the mountains. You can see these forces from a plane. Mount St. Helens is half blown away. Most of that material ended up in the flatlands.
Same with traffic on the Web. The “big” sites like Slashdot are losing traffic to the flatlands. On Sunday I got something like 15,000 visits from a front-page link on Slashdot. I remember when such a link used to be worth 40,000 to 100,000 visitors.
Where did that traffic go? My theory is that it’s spreading out to the flatlands.
So, how do you get noticed in a flatlands world? Do something interesting and let your friends who blog know about it. Every link is a vote for whether or not your stuff is interesting.
Hell, it’s hard enough reading everyone who deserves to be read, let alone linking to everyone who deserves to be linked. I wish I had an answer.
[BONUS LINK:] Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! asks, “Has blogging peaked?”
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A wee chuckle to start your day off right etc.
A-List Linking
Randy Charles Morin has just made an interesting post on A-List linking.
I think that the example of circular linking by A-Listers that Randy mentions has more to do with the blogs that the A-Listers read (that is, other A-Listers! ).HonorTag…
Incidentally Roger Eno recorded a beautiful album called The Flatlands. It sounds like how I imagine an English Cut suit would be like to wear.
I used to have a handful of sites I would read daily. I used to read 90% of all Slashdot posts and often a lot of the comments, today I log onto Bloglines and skim over posts in dozens of blogs (including this one). I’m sure I’m not the only one doing this, with so much choice you start going much less in depth. I probably read 5 – 10% of all the articles I come across fully (follow links, etc…) I don’t think I’m a special case, I haven’t read a C|Net article in six months and haven’t bought Wired in at least that long.
I’ve been following a few Flash blogs and quite a few of them have seen their stats spike because of the release of Flash 8 beta. This is what we’re moving towards, many sites, loads of content and popularity based on timing and context. Don’t particularily see a problem with that. Blogging will probably plateau, lose it’s “in” factor at some point and that will put some people off but sharing your thoughts is far too primal to ever die out.
Perhaps the tide is down for A-Listers but up for blogs over all. Two-three years ago I was blogging everyday with multiple posts, except when I was noticed by an A-Lister, 80 hits was a busy day. Now I blog less frequently but my site is regularly over 300 a day. I am willing to drop a good percent of that to robots, say a third, but still that’s over double the traffic I used to get.
Further thought, this was a Sunday post in the middle of summer, could it be Slashdotters are getting lives and not on the computer 24/7?