The blogroll, the list of notable blogs that adorns the side of many blogs (including my own), can be a rather static affair. When I started this blog I merely placed a list of blogs I considered noteworthy down the side of the page, and left it at that; to the best of my memory I have not added any new blogs to the blogroll, and have taken no blogs off. In truth however I am regularly coming across new and interesting blogs, and have therefore decided to start emphasising the ‘roll’ part of the blogroll: adding new blogs that I come across to the top of the blogroll, and taking old ones away from the bottom, never having a blog roll of more than ten.
Limiting the length of the blogroll gives the opportunity for the more obscure blogs to stand out, and who really needs to be directed towards engadget or mashable anyway?
As such my blogroll now reflects an eclectic set of obscure sites and mainstream sites that I have only just started subscribing to.
The best way to learn about the blogosphere is to be involved in the blogosphere, however much that will make you want to pull your hair out and bang your head against a wall. Whilst blogging can be a joy when writing down a few musings and reading a few comments, when those comments turn into a conversation it can be one of the most exasperating moments. It feels as though you are having a conversation at a party where everyone else has had a few drinks, and you are the only sober person. Whilst that is not to say that my opinions are necessarily more lucid than the next person’s, it is merely that they make more sense to me; equally other people’s opinions will feel more rational to them.
Blog conversations can be exasperating due to their unique combination of being asynchronous, public, personal, and providing room for long comments. Whilst other forms of communication may contain some of these factors (e.g., email-asynchronous and chatrooms-public), it is the combination of all these factors that make a blog conversation so potentially exasperating.
As blogs are both asynchronous and allow for the inclusion of long comments, people include long comments. Whilst this may seem a rational response, after all you would be conversing on the same subject for weeks if you limited yourself to one comment at a time and then waited for a response, it creates a debating environment that people try to ‘win’, rather than one where ideas are discussed rationally. Postings are not read rationally and responded to as a whole, in context of the whole conversation, but rather disingenuously with tactics that would make Eric Berne blush. The must-win mentality is only exaggerated by the public nature, whilst the personal nature of the blog to one party makes it very hard to leave a conversation whilst the other continues promoting opinions you disagree with.
Nonetheless there is a time where continued conversation makes no difference, opinions have hardened and an understanding of different perspectives is more distant than it ever was. It is at this point that you have to bite the bullet and walk away, it’s annoying, but if you don’t it becomes a slow walk to the mad house.
Its not surprising that all the big bloggers and news sources are discussing the Techmeme Leaderboard, after all, it’s all about them: the sources most frequently posted to techmeme. The obvious comparison for such a leaderboard is with Technorati’s top 100 blogs, and those that have found their ranking improved are unsurprisingly enthusiastic (e.g., Scripting News
and TechCrunch), but for every winner there is also a loser who is likely to be less enthusiastic.
Lists of the top 100 lists are always interesting, whether it is books, music, or web sites, but they don’t necessarily mean very much: only a fool really believes that the Harry Potter books are great works of literature, and the top selling records are by the best artists. This does not mean I don’t subscribe to many of the blogs and news sources on Techmeme’s Leaderboard, merely that these are by no means the only ones I subscribe to. There are many highly specialised blogs that are never likely to make it onto such a list, but are nonetheless of great interest to a certain proportion of individuals. Blogging is about enabling the opinions of many people to be heard rather than the few, the creation of a Top 100 focuses on the opinions of the few.
Scoble mentions a lack of bloggers on the list, and suggests that it may be another indicator that blogging is dieing. Personally I don’t believe blogging is dieing, it is merely changing. Whilst snippets of news and information will be shared by the micro-blogging format of Twitter, and established bloggers will gather together within one brand (e.g., Read/WriteWeb), there will continue to be a core set of bloggers for whom the traditional blog is the best way of sharing their thoughts and information.
Whilst many people enjoy looking at top 100 lists (or top-whatever), it is important that we don’t put too much store in them, and remember that there is a lot of sites beyond that top 100, and for that Technorati is much better than TechMeme.
Most people would like to earn a living doing something they enjoy and one of the things bloggers enjoy is blogging, unfortunately earning money through blogging is not particularly easy. Lasica points to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how to make money from your blog. Whilst the emphasis is on the different ways to make money by including advertising on your blog, for the majority of blogs the number of hits they are likely to receive means that including advertising may adversely effect the growth of traffic to a blog whilst failing to make any money.
Within the article the ‘good rule of thumb’ is suggested that every 1,000 page views will make the blogger 50 cents. Whilst this will vary a lot according to the topic of the blog and how ad-click-friendly the users of the blog are, it is clear that the vast majority of bloggers will fail to make even 50cents a month, and these few cents will have to be accumulated for a long time before they can be cashed in; by which point the blogger will probably have given up. Personally I find ads to be off-putting on some blogs, especially where you get the feeling that rather than being focused on the content of the blog the bloggers are more concerned with the revenue stream. Rather than ads making you money, they can make you seem very amateur.
Rather than making the blogger a few cents, the real value of blog to the blogger is through selling the blogger. Whilst few blogs are likely to make the blogger rich through adverts, they may drive business, job offers, or invitations to give talks to the blogger. Alternatively the blog may just provide additional useful contacts in a area of shared interest. All of which are of more value to the average blogger than the few cents from adverts, and all of which may be put off by adverts.
Obviously my blog is nowhere near having enough traffic to warrant the inclusion of ads, but neither is it interesting enough to drive business, job offers or invitations to talk my way, but there again, what would I really do with the 50 cents I could make over the next year?
There is a lot of talk around at the moment about the death of blogging in favour of shinier newer things. As such it may be thought to be a bit of a strange time to start a blog, especially one which primarily posts thoughts about those newer shinier things. It is my belief however that the blogosphere is far from dead, and if anything it may benefit from the exodus of certain parties who add little more to the blogosphere than an insight into their own personal lives. That is not to say that such blogs are bad, but rather the blogosphere will not overly suffer as a result as their departure…would anyone really miss the occassional updates about my long-suffering allotment?
Social-networking and micro-blogging may compete for the time of the blogger, but their uses are fundamentally different and the blog is likely to continue to hold a place for more extended (and discerning?) discourse. At the moment there is little room in social networking sites for the inclusion of extensive well thought out arguements, and their inclusion is likely to be skipped over in favour of pithy one-liners. Even more importantly the blogosphere is a far more open platform for discussion; it means nothing to me if there is an important discussion on a subject close to my heart if it is on a network I am not a member of. For the forseeable future at least, the blog still has an important role, and as I want to start my commentary now it is the natural place for me to start.