Media Orchard has taken some heat for our posts on the ongoing war between A-Listers and also-rans. And to be honest, we’ve made some mistakes.
While we didn’t personally call Shel Israel an arrogant A-Lister, for example, we excerpted a post from another blogger who did, then threw some kerosene on the fire. Folks like Kami (and Shel himself) were quick to tell us we weren’t being fair; they’re right.
We’ve also taken flack because some folks say Media Orchard has criticized blogs that don’t receive as much traffic and attention as we do. Upon closer inspection, this is also true. We never intended to position ourselves as the little guy tilting against the windmills of the big guys — but to the extent we came off that way, we’re sorry.
Sometimes we just get all fired up about something and fire off a post that’s not as well thought out as it should be. (Or maybe you’ve noticed?)
Having said all that, we find the blogging hierarchy an infinitely fascinating topic, and we’re pretty sure we’ll be writing about it again after we finish licking our wounds. So be warned.
In the meantime, we’ll just direct you to a cover story on bloggers by New York magazine. It’s great stuff.
An excerpt:
If you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches — gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course) — yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs — then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. “It just seems like it’s a big in-party,” one blogger complained to me…
That’s a lot of inequality for a supposedly democratic medium. Not long ago, Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University, became interested in this phenomenon — and argued that there is a scientific explanation. Shirky specializes in the social dynamics of the Internet, including “network theory”: a mathematical model of how information travels inside groups of loosely connected people, such as users of the Web…
When Shirky compiled his analysis of links, he saw that the smaller bloggers’ fears were perfectly correct: There is enormous inequity in the system. A very small number of blogs enjoy hundreds and hundreds of inbound links — the A-list, as it were. But almost all others have very few sites pointing to them. When Shirky sorted the 433 blogs from most linked to least linked and lined them up on a chart, the curve began up high, with the lucky few. But then it quickly fell into a steep dive, flattening off into the distance, where the vast majority of ignored blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and the C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences — and the advertising revenue they bring — go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.
Economists and network scientists have a name for Shirky’s curve: a “power-law distribution.” Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s capital, while almost everyone else has little or none. The employment of movie actors follows the curve, too, because a small group appears in dozens of films while the rest are chronically underemployed. The pattern even emerges in studies of sexual activity in urban areas: A small minority bed-hop, while the rest of us are mostly monogamous.
The power law is dominant because of a quirk of human behavior: When we are asked to decide among a dizzying array of options, we do not act like dispassionate decision-makers, weighing each option on its own merits. Movie producers pick stars who have already been employed by other producers. Investors give money to entrepreneurs who are already loaded with cash. Popularity breeds popularity.
The story features interesting interviews with a number of mostly New York-based bloggers. Check it out.
(Oh, and we’re not exactly sure why we’ve included the picture of the dog and cat wearing Elizabethan collars, but it seemed to work…)
Technorati tags: Blogging, PR, Public Relations, Marketing
Kudos to you for being “big enough” to say so. Few people do and all people should.
I liked you before, but now I feel like I have even more reason.
A lot of us get fired up and passionate and sometimes that pssion blinds us or just allows us to act faster than we can think.
Scott,
Thanks for your comments here. My post on this subject referred to you, because I regularly read Media Orchard and was surprised by the kerosene dousing. I cetainly empathize with getting a bit carried away as you say you were. Ask Richard Edelman. As TS Eliot once wrote on an entirely different topic, “Only those who will risk going too far, can possiblt find out how far one can go. I look forward to seeing yo go too far again, and I really hope it’s not directed at me. Besides, I thought the cat and dog artwork was downright cute.
Feel free to call Presto Vivace Blog an also ran, just so long as you link to it
I get about 30 hits a day, which is average.
Of course, half of that comes from people looking for a Target logo. For some reason, my old blogspot address kicks in as the #2 link on Google Image search.
That logo is the only thing keeping me on the C-list. But that’s okay — I blog for myself, and not for the 15 geniuses who come to me on purpose. (Really. I love you guys.)
There’s nothing wrong with pushing people’s buttons a bit — whether it’s justified or not. It’s good to see if they are reading.
If you are wrong, then you have another topic for a post.
Good post, you arrogant, conceited, Dallas blogger A-lister!
Mike
Ed Schipul told me that a while back, there was a mini-trend (notice I didn’t say “meme”) where top bloggers would draw traffic by making outrageous statements about each other, then retracting them. It became a silly game. That’s not my goal — so next time I criticize another blogger, you can be pretty sure I’ll have my ducks in a row. But my criticism of Shel was not fair.
We’ve been talking about this on BMA, and what many people don’t realize is, Technorati links are meaningless in measuring traffic. We’ve all had it beaten into our heads that high links = high traffic. Check the traffic on blogs that have a link to Site Meter or Stat Counter on their blogs, and you’ll see that that’s not always the case.
Mack,
No question about it; inbound links are not a traffic measure, and as you and I have discussed, Alexa traffic rankings are also a poor gauge of traffic.
Interestingly, the researcher in the New York article stated that there was an 80 percent correlation between inbound links and traffic. Don’t know where he pulled that figure from…but it’s in New York magazine, so it must be true
Scott; you are a stand-up guy and I appreciate your “honest moment,” so I nominate you for your own contest, even though you won’t win
As for links vs traffic, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Linking is pretty much transparent, Technorati, PubSub and others track these for us and everyone can see what they are (though they are not completely accurate sometimes).
Besides Alexa, which is not complete since it relies on participation, you can’t get a clear picture of traffic in a transparent way.
Most of us have programs that give us traffic stats (I am lucky to have Google Analytics, which is very comprehensive), but I can’t look at your traffic and you can’t look at mine transparently. I wonder why that is?
Not to further confuse things, Kami, but I track my traffic with two different tools: StatCounter and GoDaddy’s TrafficFacts. And the GoDaddy numbers are always significantly higher than the StatCounter numbers. Not sure how the StatCounter numbers line up with SiteMeter, but the whole thing gives me a headache.
Well, I imagine I will also be looking at a GoDaddy traffic counter soon since I have my business URL hosted with them. I’ll let you know how they compare with Analytics (which is very cool indeed).
Is blogging a popularity contest?
From a user’s perspective, there is no “A List” there is only a blogroll, feeds, bookmarked favorites.
Each person assembles her own micro-blogospheria that becomes “the blogosphere” for that person.
Under-achievers whine.
Hardcore Bloggers press on.