November 2, 2005
powerlaw, schmowerlaw
One of the great blog visionaries and a terrific guy to boot, Joi Ito has dropped off the Technorati 100:
My Technorati ranking has become #104 and I’ve officially fallen off the Technorati top 100. Powerlaw, schmowerlaw. If you don’t blog often or maintain a stream of interesting content your ranking will quickly drop.
I would agree with that. There are a lot of great bloggers out there. Joi was an very early adaptor of bogs, I assume he’s moved on, early-adapting something else with equal vigor. It’ll be interesting to see his next move.
2005 was a watershed year for bloggers.
2005 was the year blogs hit the mainstream.
2005 was the year when making money via blogs became a no-brainer.
2005 was the year when the blogosphere became too darn big.
Yesterday I was talking to Phil Torrone, the editor of O’Reilley’s MAKE blog.
He is, like myself, a full-time professional blogger.
The subject of our conversation: How keeping up with the blogosphere now feels like a full-time job. How actually writing the blog in comparison is a piece of cake.
But yeah, I’m glad the whole thing has exploded. A lot of us bet our entire future careers on the fact that it would.
Hugh — Don’t fall into the “Have to Blog Everyday” trap
In this post Hugh wonders about the blogging “powerlaw”, and says that to stay at the top you must blog constantly.
I don’t know about other people who digest their blogs through an aggregator, but that’s probably the fastest way to get taken out of my ag
The question that springs to mind is what’s the next step.
Is “the whole thing” going to fade away? Thus your bet on the future goes south.
Or is it going to evolve? Allowing you to grow along with it (or making it grow).
Does anyone know? Can anyone know?
I think it may also be because blogs have gone mainstream — the things that are interesting is different for the common people. That means what was interesting for the bloggers in 2004 is no longer interesting for people in 2005 ( I mean the new people!!)
Content and constant update may have nothin to do with that … or they may be highly correlated!
Mainstream also means that the blog-abusers will get more plentiful. You already find blog-spam in Technorati: people with fake blog posts flogging products. Others are doing comment-spam. There is a danger as blogs can become devalued now.
Betting the Farm on Blogging Pays Off For Some
The brilliant Hugh Macleod, who collaborated with me on the mainstream blog project Up Your Budget notes that keeping up with the blogosphere feels like a full-time job now. “But yeah,” Hugh writes, “I’m glad the whole thing has exploded. A lot of us b…