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March 20, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Patrick
Agreed.
Two things on that. One, a-list bloggers aren’t there because they’re always brilliant but because they are sometimes brilliant (or brilliantly networked) so yes, sometimes they put out crap, we keep reading them waiting for the golden nuggets.
Two, or maybe more of a 1b, I’d be curious to know what the influence of RSS is on the staying power of being a-list. If you put out something brilliant a couple of times and get noticed by 2-3 a-listers it’s relatively easy to get pretty big spikes in traffic, do it a few times and you’re there (not that I’ve actually done it). Hard to write those great pieces (or great useless memes, another way to get attention) but the rising after that can be easy.
Some of them however stay high much beyond their worth and I think it’s in part because it’s so easy to simply stay subscribed (even easier to lazily not change a blogroll) that people keep reading them, keep hitting their pages once in a while and thus keeps them afloat for longer than deserved.
In meatspace it’s a long process to build a good reputation and it can be destroyed quickly. For blogging you can burn brightly for a few months, achieve some kind of high list status and coast for a good long while.
March 21, 2007 at 5:08 am
matbalez
But wouldn’t it be nice if rather than subscribing to bloggers, we could instead subscribe to only Golden Nuggets? I suppose that’s what community/algorithmic filtering services like digg and TechMeme are aiming to do – but I think there is still a long way to go before we have really good (and automated?) content discovery tools.
And you’re right, I think RSS does draw out the phenomenon I describe – good point.
Finally, I’d never heard the term MEATSPACE before. I think it’s hilarious.
March 21, 2007 at 11:46 am
Patrick
Hehe, not sure where I got that, even Wikipedia doesn’t cite an exact source, just “cyberpunk genre”. I would have guessed Doctorow but seeing the cyberpunk association, probably more Gibson.
March 24, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Miss Rogue
Hey Mat,
I don’t know if I even deserve to be listed as ‘A-lister’ as I’m waaaaaay behind GigaOm, Scoble, Sierra, etc. in the rankings, but I can explain HorsePigCow.
It wasn’t a marketing stint. It was a website I owned when I set out to start musing on this new online diary type thingy that someone inspired me to start (Joey DeVilla – Accordian Guy in Toronto, actually). I had three domains that I owned: Roguestrategies.com (my former company), Roguereport.com and horsepigcow.com. Because it started as a personal diary and as an experiment, I didn’t want to put it on my company domain (yet).
On my ‘About’ page, I discuss the name…which comes from a silly saying my Mom used to have. When she forgets someone’s name, she yells (almost tourets-like) ‘Horse Pig Cow!’ then recalls the name. It’s odd. We were on the phone when I was purchasing roguestrategies et al when my mom called me by my brother’s name, yelled HPC and then my own. I laughed. It was ridiculous, and I ended up purchasing the name right there. Two years later, I started blogging…and I owned the domain…so…
And I think I always meant to switch it to something more meaningful to what I do, but I never really found something quite right for it. Then, all of a sudden, people were reading me and subscribing to me and I was kind of stuck with it.
The farm animals are silly, but that’s kind of the point now. It’s not something to dazzle anyone. Quite the opposite. I operate in a very serious businessworld and my silly farm animals fly in the face of that. Plus, I was raised on a farm (we didn’t have pigs though), so it has the effect of reminding me of my roots. I hope most of my readers stay for the content. I know the name actually frightens (or used to anyway) many people AWAY from my site, so it’s actually the anti-marketing in that way.
Anyway…hope that answers your question. I don’t like the idea of A-list any more than the next person and it’s totally the antithesis of personal publishing anyway. Some people at the ‘top’ are totally power hungry. Others are there because they have rockin’ content (like Kathy Sierra). Either way, it’s like DIGG, you hit a tipping point and then oodles of people just subscribe to you because they think they should cause everyone else is. Doesn’t sound very democratic to me…:)
March 25, 2007 at 5:52 am
Mat
Well herd mentality certainly is one of the big problems with ‘democracy’.
And thanks very much for the thorough description of how HPG came to be! Not what I expected. I guess next time I should spend more time hanging around your About page
April 3, 2007 at 2:41 am
Great Montreal Blogs for April Blogtipping : Instigator Blog
[...] He’s not coddling up to anyone, which is quite refreshing. Note a couple of recent posts – The A-List Blogger Phenomenon: Antithesis of the Web and RIP Twitter (2007-2007). Whether you agree or not, at least he’s [...]
April 3, 2007 at 11:23 am
heri
hi mat
are you referring to you ’secret innovation project’?
are you thinking about an anti-technorati?
April 3, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Digg is a Tabloid
[...] read Mat’s post saying how difficult it is now for citizens to get heard among media empires. He wants original and quality content to rise above the noise and talks about digg.com, which made [...]
April 19, 2007 at 2:13 am
Frank
Well,
i guess it’s a lot like in the music industry:
The music that is most POPULAR isn’t neccessarily the BEST music that’s out there.Quite the contrary.For every Britney Spears there is a 1000 artists that would deserve to be on the top at least just as much as her and that are probably more talented as well.Just that noone knows these artÃsts.They’re out there, but they’re not POPULAR because nobody knows them.
Myspace et al is starting to change this situation a little in favor of those otherwise unknown artists but of course it’s still a struggle to get *really* good music to the masses.
Just because GOOD doesn’t automatically equal POPULAR and vice versa as we all know.
So with the A-list bloggers it’s just the same very familiar phenomenon i think.
April 19, 2007 at 2:16 am
Mat
Yes, I think you’re right Frank. It’s largely the same… I just wish the Internet we’re achieving more success at breaking that popularity paradigm.
It will, it will…. in time.
February 23, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Digg is a Tabloid | Heri does Ruby on Rails and Design
[...] read Mat’s post saying how difficult it is now for citizens to get heard among media empires. He wants original and quality content to rise above the noise and talks about digg.com, which made [...]