Equality on the blogosphere - no gaping voids.
Following up on a conversation with Hugh Macleod over on gapingvoid.
To me, equality in the blogosphere is not about every blogger being the same in quantity or measure of what they write. And it is not about status, whether measured by outcome, traffic, readership, quality or even those (I think fictitious) “attractive, sexually willing blog groupies” to which Hugh alludes. To me it’s that each person who contributes something has that something heard. In short it’s about connection.
We just want to start a conversation about IDENTIFYING ‘disconnected stuff‘ in the LongTail and DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Every voice should have at least one listener. Every writer at least one reader. Every feed at least one subscriber.
I don’t see it currently in the web2.0. There’s tools available today there are mechanisms focussed on highlighting/ranking ‘popular’ or ‘topN’ posts (with lots of links). Even efforts that try to identify value in ‘Z’ list posts, tend to promote those posts to ‘A’ list status (even if for a short time) and bringing stuff out of the long tail into the short head. (for example: Robert Scoble’s post about aussie kid from obscurity to front page of wall street journal in 48hrs). Promotion to A-list status isn’t what I’m on about.
Lots of unrealised potential value goes untapped in the long tail. Connecting these less popular posts to people who care about the content can be done using the ‘context cluster’ ideas to connect subscribers to obscure publishers.
Rather than show me the top 100 blogs with most links, show me the bottom 100 without any links. Rather than highlight the long established bloggers who’ve built up, yet need little support, show me the newest blogs who might need a bit of support and might have interesting things to say about just what I’m interested in.
All things on the blogosphere may not be of equal value - but all people are.
Dave
Technorati Tags: Hugh Macleod, Robert Scoble, equality, inequality, longtail, longtailjewel
Thanks for the mention =)
Luckily, for every blogger trying hard to create a hierarchy, there are at lest fifty even smarter people trying even harder to subvert it. I like those odds.
If you want more people reading your blog, then write better stuff. That’s usually the way the it works. Much easier (and more realistic) than waiting for some hypothetical coder to invent some hypothetical utopian hierarcy-killer.
More thoughts here:
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002255.html
Comment by hugh macleod — February 18, 2006 @ 7:59 pm
[…] This podcast is really background to my response to Hugh here and was the means by which Mike helped me by discussing the issues and doing the bulk of the typing - the task I find slowest while laid up. […]
Pingback by Blob » Horizontal HQ Sessions #2 — February 19, 2006 @ 2:35 pm
Very well put Dave. As part of the very longest end of the longtail, I too am not looking for fame and fortune, but maybe just that one (or two) readers that might be interested in what I have to say. Everyone has an opinion and the blogosphere is where it can be heard.
Comment by Jodie Miners — February 20, 2006 @ 12:58 pm
An attempt at Kent’s “second opinion”
My blogging friend Kent Newsome had a great idea recently (I’m sure it’s just the latest of many). After all the talk about gatekeepers and how A-listers such as Doc Searls could do more by linking to unknown bloggers, Kent decided to star…
Trackback by mathewingram.com/work — February 20, 2006 @ 1:02 pm
Jodie, thanks for the attention. Re Opinions: a quote I use “Opinions are like arseholes, everyone’s got one, but you don’t always show them in public”. I’ve no idea where it came from…maybe I made it up. But it helps me think about what I’m saying.
Comment by dnw — February 20, 2006 @ 4:08 pm
Mon Nov 20, 2006 at 5:45 PM to all of the discussions I have previously blogged about or refered to around this discussion.Equality on the blogosphere - no gaping voids.Mike’s take on our LongTailJewels discussionsJewels i http://dnwallace.com/blog/?p=201
Trackback by Anonymous — November 21, 2006 @ 11:15 am