A few months ago I posted about my worry that blog posts were so temporal as to be obsolete the moment they were written. When I went back and read my zine articles from the 80s, they seemed more relevant today than some blog posts from a few weeks ago. Mark Cuban writes about this today.
Mark calls this Blog Pimpin' and since I came across this via Techmeme, I may be guilty via his definition. He says:
In the Blogosphere, self promotion is out of control. Self Diggin , Slashdotting and Deliciousizing are pretty much par for the course, but more prevalent is the new habit of writing about whatever the top story is on the aggregation sites. If its at the top of Techmeme, there are a core of bloggers that you know are just going to write about the top ranking story. Why ? Because then your blog gets listed under the top of mind, top of page topic. Which leads to more traffic. Thats BlogPimpin.
When I wrote my earlier post about this, I decided that I wanted to make sure I had posts that would stay relevant. I was adamant about that for a week or so, but then noticed something important - I can't start all the conversations.
So I try to balance. I try to blog original - all Jim - content half the time and respond to other stuff the other half the time.
But Mark is also talking about gaming the blogosphere. He is right, many people only blog about things that are already hot and then ride that readership wave. These people start to build up feedback loops where they cross-Digg and use other mechanisms to put their blog's links in people's faces.
This type of gaming is all short-term gain. I've noticed that if I speak at a conference, my subscribers go up more than a week of headlining on Techmeme.
You can tell the gamers too. Their responses are often utterly devoid of original thought. Often they will trackback to everyone who has been involved in the conversation - whether they are quoted or not. That's link farming and I usually call people on it.
But, ultimately, we need to ask ourselves what are the value of the words we are sending out into the world. Will they advance a conversation or remain valuable in the future? Or are they merely there to show that we have a blog and can get people to click on the link?
Blogged with Windows Live Writer at the Gray Hill Harbor Offices (Seattle)
It's all so much easier if you throw-out the whole "blogophere" concept. Or, to put it another way:
The blogosphere *is* a marketplace that only exists so people can game blog technology for social and/or financial gain.
If you ditch the blogosphere, you can see a more "conversational" sphere across blogs and zines and forums and broadcast websites, etc. It's the whole WWW, and blog technology just means another way to create web pages.
Just ignore everything that is part of the blogosphere, and you get to enjoy blog posts and all kinds of other good web pages!
Posted by: Jay Fienberg | 10 November 2006 at 16:15
Communicators! Throw of your bloggy chains of oppression, lose your Winer yokes, and join the freedom of formatless conversation!
You have nothing to lose but your reverse chronology.
Posted by: Jim Benson | 10 November 2006 at 21:16