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Stop blogging
Apologies in advance for the sensationalist headline. Apologies also for the Inside Baseball nature of this post. If you don't write a blog, you can go ahead and skip this one.
This morning when I heard that Google bought wiki company JotSpot, I was upset. You see, I knew that the next time I opened my RSS reader there would be at least two dozen articles with the exact same post. And sure enough there were 26 "Google buys Jotspot" posts waiting for me. And none of them brought anything to the table other than "hey here's some breaking news: Google bought JotSpot." I am fairly discriminating with the feeds I subscribe to, and generally the people I read are unique and interesting. So what's with the rash of me-too posts? I think some of the blame goes to the culture of TechMeme, an influential and massively popular (Massively popular with tech bloggers, not real world popular. Kind of how Second Life is massively popular) hotlist of tech & political news. Here's how TechMeme loosely works: Someone writes an interesting blog post. Enough algorithmically important people (your "A-listers" and whatnots) also write about the same thing, and everyone gets promoted to the front page of the site. It is an interesting concept, and for the first two weeks of TechMeme's life (it was called Memeorandum back then) it was a nice way to find new stories that were becoming hot.
Unfortunately, it seems everyone these days wants to become an A-list blogger, whatever that is. Maybe it's the internet fame, maybe it's the dream of living off of your Adsense revenue, but the number of people trying to game the system is growing exponentially with every Google acquisition. In a world where your "influence" is measured by inbound links and RSS subscribers, getting link love from a high-profile blogger is like crack cocaine. Once you see that spike in traffic you begin scheming about what you can do to get your next fix. The easiest way to do this is to write about whatever the top story is on TechMeme and be sure to send trackbacks to the top people linked from there. With enough luck you will ride their coattails up the TechMeme ladder. Maybe someone important will link to you. Maybe someone else will even quote you. You can pretty much count on your traffic and subscribers increasing though if you catch the right news story.
The key to all this, and the part that everyone seems to be forgetting, is that you have to bring something new to the conversation if you want people to read you. And if you don't have anything unique to add to a story, that probably means you don't need to write about it. The other people in the 100+ pages of Technorati search results for JotSpot today have you covered. It's a simple rule, but seems to have escaped people.
By the way, this isn't just limited to tech blogs. MP3 blogs are just as bad (and I admit to more than one me-too post in my time).
I think your point is good, in general, as people keep trying to jump in on what is supposedly "easy money". Write something new. Write something of value. Those are the things that deserve to get pushed...
Comment by Grokodile — November 2, 2006 @ 2:20 pmYou make being a blog-whore sound dirty or something. LOL
Cool info, SM, good to think about.
Comment by writerbd — November 3, 2006 @ 2:28 pmI'd love if I could claim credit for destroying the blogosphere.
But the phenomenon you described actually preceded my sites. The classic example I like to trot out: consider Ebay's acquisition of Skype. Huge pileon: http://www.techmeme.com/050912/h2130
But at that point Techmeme hadn't yet publicly launched. That happened about an hour later.
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