August 9, 2005
the “under-read through no fault of their own” folk
More interesting comments being generated in a recent gapingvoid post. Apparently “A-Listers” should spend more time finding “new voices” and linking to people who “deserve to be heard”.
In other words, widely-read bloggers should spend less time doing what genuinely interests them and more time working to improve the lot of the “Under-Read Through No Fault Of Their Own” folk.
Does anyone else think this is a really bad idea?
[BONUS LINK:] From Danah Boyd:
All links are created equal. All relationships are not. Treating everything like a consistent weak tie is quantity over quality and in social networks, that means male over female.
[UPDATE:] The Head Lemur leaves in the comments below, The Top Ten Reasons to Keep The Downtrodden in Their Place, including: “1. The Downtrodden give us a place to rest our feet when we post.”
Danah Boyd: and in social networks, that means male over female.
Hmm, most social networks I’ve seen have as many females as males, in general. Orkut, say. Just because the blogosphere may have more females than males (I’m confident it’s pretty close though) isn’t really a problem.. I mean, why would you want to stick a dividing line between female and male bloggers anyway? We’re one big happy family, not some man vs woman or black vs white gang.
Anyway, Hugh, I’d agree that bloggers shouldn’t get distracted from talking about what interests them, but many do seem so precious that they will rarely link to stuff outside of their band of buddies. Myself, however, I could care less whether my readers find other blogs or not.
test
(because I’m getting spam filtered)
There probably does need to be a better way for high-quality, low-traffic blogs to get noticed (and get Google juice).
But it’s definitely *not* going to happen in any meaningful way by getting the so-called “A-Listers” to run some kind of public-service links.
Besides, linking to interesting but obscure sites is the main point of some of the highest-traffic blogs out there. BoingBoing and MetaFilter, to name just two, are almost exclusively about that.
As a blogger-yet-to-be, this is the *last* thing I’d want. Getting noticed and connected is *my* job.
And that said, I really should get over my dislike of self-promotion and suggest that you click through to my site if your taste in listening material extends to noise and experimental music. TIA…
Yep, it’s a really bad idea to spend less time doing what genuinely interests you. But some folk might be genuinely interested in improving the lot of other folk.
There are so many ways to attract bloggers — starting with links (I doubt any A-List blogger has not at least one ego search on his blogurls, his name and or products) to other blogs, doing clever comments, pinging services on tags etc.
*If* you have high quality content, it is even more likely to attract readers.
Give, then get. Not the other way round and you probably need to let go of the opinion, that it is enough to stay in your little sandbox.
And as I have said several times before: It is neither enough ‘just’ to be female, it is also not enough to have just a nice design and it is especially not enough to have sometimes content, which interests me.
I do read (and link to) people I am interested in, much more than I do postings on special topics. And yes, ‘A-Listers’ should continue to blog about what is fun for them. That is probably why I read and link to them, if I want to continue the conversation.
I took it more as a way of the A listers breaking out of the mold — get away from the regular reads and try and find someone new to read. The blogging world can become very insular with the same bunch of people blogging about the same bunch of people over and over again. It doesnt mean stopping doing what you enjoy doing though.
When you said “So here’s what I think my fellow bloggers should start doing more often: Find the coolest blog in the industry you’re in, and see if you can’t make a deal with the owner.” did you mean only seek out reciprocal ads on the coolest blogs once you were as equally cool or had the same amount of traffic or had the same amount of readers?
Interesting that some people call giving a less read blog an ad “affirmative action” but unless both blogs hosting the ad are equal it will can always be seen as “affirmative action”.
You said “Now as a result, my blog is pretty well-known in adland. Sure, it took a while. A few hundred every week.”
Was it affirmative action when Adrants put your ad on their site?
Hugh, if you are not looking for new thoughts and views in your subjectarea, which can come quite a lot from the whippersnappers then you’ll be like the dinosaurs you talk about. There is no need to seek out new unread blogs to link to, surely on your webtravels you find new and interesting thoughts. Why not link to a site that you think your audience should also read?
I found Evelyn Rodriguez via this blog , I would have been oblivious to her views before that and probably would never have found her despite the fact that she is writing as Nicole puts it “high quality content” There are blogs being created every few seconds now according to Technorati, even if a tiny tiny proportion of them are writing “high quality content” they are going to remain unknown no matter how good they are.
Bad idea? Yeah. It defeats the whole point of blogging. I mean, write what you want, the way you want, when you want. If it’s good enough, it’ll get talked about and read. Period.
Not many people read my blog. But that’s ok. I’m writing what I wanna write. The people who wanna read it, will. And if I want more people to read it, I’d have to start playing to the audience. Do I want to do that? Well, I’d better start a newspaper then. Not a blog.
Hugh, there are a couple of points you’re glossing over with your post.
1) Mary Hodder makes a great point in her post from 6Aug: “I think a newly made blogroll link now, in the age of 14,000,000+ blogs is far more telling of community and interest, than a blogroll link made five years ago when there were 100,000 blogs (in other words, few choices about where to link). And of course, links made in posts, which are more indicative of conversation or immediate attention about specific topics, are lumped in as well, with the same weight as a blogroll link, for the indexes we have now.”
IOW, when the T’rati 100 and similar “Top 100″ lists are created, they take aged links from blogrolls at the same value as new links from new posts. IOOW, old blogs that are already deeply cross-linked are apt to stay on the list, even if what they are writing about now is not read-worthy.
http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000513.html
2) Danah’s post rocks.
Disagreeingly, but respectfully yours,
Chris
Doing one thing doesn’t always subtract from another theing. By simply mentioning one “pet project” blog that’s worth reading, you’re not necessarily limiting your own creativity or things you enjoy. They’re not even related items; the pet blog would simply be A POST once in a while…
“Hey, I saw this super cool blog about the mating patterns of the jellyfish… go check it out… and in other news I’m an A-lister LOOK AT ME! I don’t have to do anything to justify my audience anymore; they read because they LOVE ME, not because of the content!”
Nothing would have to change…
I’m thinking of specific A-listers when I write the above; not Hugh.
It’s easy for the obscure to get frustrated when they feel a sense of entitlement… Long ago, I was trying to make it in this world as a poet (of all things). I remember countless conversations with other poets, most of whom were in fact quite good, in which we bitched all night about our inability to get anywhere without connections. It seemed you had to “know somebody” to get anywhere, and we hated that.
Then I grew up. And realized that it was pretty easy to “know somebody.” All you really gotta do is introduce yourself intelligently. It helps if you’re doing something interesting… My experience has been that if you *are* doing something interesting, and introduce it to an A-lister who covers that area, there’s a good chance they will blog it.
For instance, Hugh blogged a project of mine back in February (http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001359.html).
The project has since moved to a new URL: http://johntunger.typepad.com/studio/ but it’s doing well, and getting picked up occasionally all over the blogosphere.
Is it an A-list blog? Hell no, it’s a dinky little thing and doesn’t even get updated all that frequently. But it’s been linked or reviewed on all but a couple of the A-list blogs I read. Why? Context, conversation, introductions, etc.
If you make your small blog relevant to the big cats, they’ll sniff it. If they like the way it smells, they just might link it. But complaining about the unfairness of it all ain’t making anyone sexy.
Ya it’s a bad idea.
The primary reason is the guilt card.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
“For only 20 characters a day, you can bring a under-read blogger to lunch at the big kids table.”
“For less typing than you spend writing your blog, you can lift a obscure downtrodden blogger into the sunshine of the A-List.”
“Jesus loves You”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
If that appeal doesn’t work perhaps this will help.
Top TEN Reasons to Keep the Downtrodden in their Place.
10. The infection they got from piercing their toungue, requires Medical Attention.
9.You can’t get the ingredients for Cat Stuffed with Wild Rice and Sea Snails at Wal Mart.
8.There is a reason they live on the south side of the tracks.
7.Demonstrating Inbreeding is not news.
6.‘Angst’ is not a lifestyle
5.Their children really look like monkeys.
4.Of course Jimmy wants to touch your tits.
3.No Pussy, No linky
2.spelin is optinall
1.The downtrodden give us a place to rest our feet when we post.
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/2005/08/my_links_are_mi.html
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/2005/08/my_links_are_mi.html
PS:
“Was it affirmative action when Adrants put your ad on their site?”
No, Damien, it was a cash deal
Wow. What a can of blogworms this opened! Everybody wants to easily get or buy that which can only be earned and is only worth anything when it is earned. Some of the old-skool rules will always be true: rule #1: THERE’S A SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE.
rule #2: NO FREE LUNCHES, DAMMIT.
I think this was the plot of “Atlas Shrugged,” was it not?
Ayn Rand was certainly heavy-handed, but unfortunately she was more astute a student of human nature than I wish she’d been.
It’s not the role of the successful to help the unsuccessful join the club. Sink or swim, people.
Peter — i’m talking about actual social networks as studied by anthropologists and sociologists, not the articulated kinds available on services like Orkut and Friendster. There are a lot of reasons that the structures of the latter are not the same as maintained in everyday life. Also, you will find that women get more network requests than men in most articulated systems because people want to be linked to women, regardless of the sex of the linker. In the case of Orkut, you will find many men who only link to women.
I’ve said before, there’s always a freshman class of bloggers, and we should stick together, get through this together, rather than try and sit at the senior’s lunch table.
If you want a social network, build one on your own. It’s not what the A-listers can do for you, it’s what we can do for each other.
Besides, the blog is on it’s way out as a medium for the masses. There needs to be a micro-content management system for the rest of us, those that have to much to do than to keep up with the 24-hour meme cycle.
The A-list. After you’re done talking about it, you’ll all realize that daily posts are not a universal model. And then you’ll realize you shouldn’t leave your reachability to the whims of Google.
New software on the way.
Having been at BlogHer, I can speak to what I believe was the real intention behind the furor about the A-List and linking behavior. That conversation, the genesis for this thread, was not concerned with getting A-Listers to link more often to lesser-known bloggers.
In the context of that particular conversation (specifically Mary Hodder’s suggestion for different metrics to rank blogs), the request I saw being expressed: the desire for the ranking methodologies to be more tailored to the interests of the individual.
Right now, one link is the same as another in some aspects — a link reference is counted once — but different in other ways — a link from an A-Lister is counted once, but carries more weight in the ranking algorithm. But what if that weighting varied on the basis of the person doing the searching? If I could tell a web site, “You know, I like *this* set of people/blogs (perhaps signaled by whom I link to on my own blog) — put more weight on sites linked to by the set of people I like when performing my search/creating my Top 100 list”.
It’s intuitive (I like this kind of stuff, give me more), but I’m sure it’s horrendously difficult or even impossible to do using today’s technology. I mean, it would essentially require a unique ranking of the net for every single user — basically every searcher would need a unique Google index to drive their searches!
I’m not clear on whether the results would be that different from that achieved using the current method — after all, the same type of ranking methodology allows Amazon to recommend books pretty well simply based on the past purchases I have in common with other customers — would it really be that different if they only made recommendations based on people whose recommendations I’d liked in the past? Would it be any better?
Alan Gutierrez, I think you’re missing the point:
Repeat after me:
It’s not about the software.
It’s not about the software.
It’s not about the software…
If (and it may be a big ‘if’) people read my blog, I’d rather it was because they found it interesting than because Hugh mentions it.
And Alan — I agree — we freshmen should stick together!
However, there may be some point to the original idea. Not so much that the so-called “A-listers” should do their community service for the poor and down-trodde, but maybe some of them have closed ranks, and have stopped looking for new blogs (so far Hugh is NOT GUILTY, but we’re watching …)
Besides, isn’t Hugh doing HIS community service with the Hughpage?
http://www.thehughpage.com/Main_Page
““If (and it may be a big ‘if’) people read my blog, I’d rather it was because they found it interesting than because Hugh mentions it. “”
And how would they find your blog Ric?
Uh, oh. Never a good sign when Hugh gets pedantic.
I’m not at the curly-brace level here, I’m talking a little further up.
Google begat blogging. In the pursuit of the Google ranking people went after daily updates, for relevance. Because inbound links mattered, it became important to have things to link to, and thus durable URLs are taken seriously, creating the permalink.
In that sense, software did define the structure of the web. When people first got on the web, they treated their web sites like a store front, constantly changing the window dressing. Now people are producing content, and in the context of the content of others. They are creating conversations.
Again, not at the curly brace level, but a little higher up. There is going to be a new generation of blogging software that isn’t going to beg you to be journalist. It is going to focus on the exchange of links. We spend so much time on our Google ranking, why not simply exchange links directly?
Should A-Listers Promote Underlings?
I got a kick out of this gapingvoid post about the role of A-list bloggers in promoting those of us who are not A-listers.