The Dirty Dozen at Digg?
Came across this analysis which says that while Digg is becoming more mainstream, the number of sites that enjoy regular home page positions on the site is shrinking. There are reportedly 12 sites that are lucky to have their article grace Digg's home page on a regular basis.
These dirty (or, lucky - depends on who's talking)
12 sites are:
Ars Technica
Gizmodo
Engadget
Torrentfreak
Techcrunch
Valleywag
ReadWriteWeb
Mashable
Gigaom
VentureBeat
CenterNetworks
I propose we leave all the hypocrisy behind and build ourselves a "Originalsignal.com+Popurls.com" type page with feeds for all these 12 sites.
Add the popular sites on Techmeme.com as well.
Do not share a tear for social news.
Labels: Digg, social news, techmeme
How to be an Ego Blogger
There are three main ways, people make money with blogging. In brief, there are:
1. The Niche Blogger (problogger.net, digitalinspiration.com). In web 2.0 reportage field, Techcrunch has a big lead over many aspiring blogs, and is followed at some distance by readwriteweb.com, mashable.com, venturebeat.com, which are all readable blogs on web 2.0.
2. The Spam Blogger/network of blogs filled with rewritten material and optimized for maximum adsense earnings.
Too many to be named on one page.
3. The A-lister/Pundit Blogger, where you make money based on your accumulated reputation, through a variety of online/offline extensions.
Now, many people don’t have the relevant field expertise and general peer-respect that people like Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer enjoy.
I have seen many people who are in the so-called A-list of bloggers because they were the first to blog.
Aided by geography, some bloggers live in certain places that are humming with other voices eager to connect and are helped further by ingratiating aggregators like Techmeme.
Some people among these A-listers got there by chance and have discovered, just like the SEO guys figured out Google, that making a noise around you is perhaps the easiest way to remain in the news, that is, the currency of links keeps on flowing for these smarty pants.
These are the Ego Bloggers.So, if joining the A-list of the blogosphere is your kind of thing, being an Ego Blogger is the way to go.
How do you become an Ego Blogger and join the ranks of self-obsessed/navel gazing, mutually back-scratching group of pundits?
Follow this simple 7-course path.
Follow again and again until you have done it.
1. Catch on the back of a rising star and use it to promote yourself.Robert Scoble resurrected his flagging post-microsoft blogging career with his
exploits on Facebook, which was the rising star of 2007. There were some others who rode on Twitter's back.
2. Do something outrageous. Call people names and benefit from resulting useless linkfest on Techmeme.
Sadly, for this you have to be on the A-list. The question is: how low can you go?
3. Insert your name in as many things as possible.For your consideration, the 'mememe(put your name here) awards/predictions/index'
4. Start with praising these great people on their blogs and in your posts.
Hopefully, they will award you with a link. Warning: chances of success with this are very. very low.
5. Do some coding and photoshop magic and start by announcing you have received 100,000 page views in the past two days (Don't forget to put this on Digg as well).
6. Follow Techmeme throughout the day.Not only, you will be following a time-honored A-lister tradition, you might get some story pointers as well.
7. If all else fails, move to San Fransisco, if New York is too far.Together, these two cities form the Twin Capitals of the Blogosphere.
Somebody should put all the blogs on Technorati Too 100 and the Techmeme Leaderboard on a map and then we will know more on this.
Labels: blogging, news aggregators, techmeme, tip
Are aggregators like Techmeme making us dumb?
The dumbing down of the blogosphere is already under way. General purpose, mass-led aggregators like Digg are no better than a young techie male's’ version of a supermarket tabloid. Reddit started strong with politics but is not fast going under with Ron Paul fans and NSFW pics. Del.icio.us, a bookmarking tool is better but, as is the case with all aggregators, searching for the best in the latest takes effort.
Google News does not give you great news. Essays and opinions are sparse and most headlines are pure pile ons.
Speaking about
pile ons, I was pretty enthusiastic when Gabe Reviera’s Techmeme came on the scene, promising to point to the crème-de-la crème of online tech writing (Techmeme, aka Memeorandum has its sister sites for celebs, politics and sports). For a while it was convenient reading the latest deep think about technology and business.
Then I started writing for my own blog in October 2006 and at first I was thrilled to notice 4-5 (never more) footfalls from Techmeme and then I discovered that because I had inadvertently chosen a link already present on Techmeme and had taken time to comment, I think it was a post by Om Malik, that the Gabe Rivera’s algorithm determined that I was ‘someone’ and I must say it wasn’t flattering.
The first response of any budding blogger would have been to comment and link to Techmeme regulars like crazy but I soon found that barring a few writers, most of the stuff on Techmeme was, well, drivel – product launches, service improvements, A-listers grappling with each others for no other reason than “look at me! I am important!”.
These days, I find few new things to write about. The idea of commenting on Big Bloggers to garner attention never appealed to me and I am not proud that I did this for the first few months while blogging.
Besides, I have less times to
'opine'.
During times that the Valley deems to be earth-shattering, iPhone launch, Facebook, earnings report for the big three, you saw nothing but
pile ons – a glorified version of Google news.
The point is I found less valuable stuff to read on Techmeme than in my own RSS reader. It is a playground for a select few, among whom people who do provide insight can be counted on my left hand fingers. Among the regulars on Techmeme, people have started painting them as being in the bed with PR people.
Todd Cochrane writes about
how they are gaming the whole elite blogger concept :
…a recent post on TechCrunch.com achieved a top listing on TechMeme.com only after 3 other sites had linked in to the story. While I watched that story grow to have nearly 25 sites linking to it the long tail effect is a Public Relations Managers dream.
You have an “A” list site like TechCrunch that rarely writes a negative review, you then have a auxiliary base of 25–100 blogs that link to the same review as their sourced material. Than Google comes around and indexes all the sites.
What you have just achieved is a #1 spot in the Google Search Results for an article on a product update or new site release. While this is not PayPerPost it is definitely “Public Relations Gaming” of the Tech Blogging community.
So,
can there be a possibility that some so-called A-listers have made deals with SEOs and PR people? I don’t know but I support Todd’s contention that we should move back to our RSS readers for a better understanding of the news.
It is better to have a lot of good essayists and analysts (Jupiter Research, Kelsey Group) in your RSS reader.
If you can’t get a good night’s sleep without a dose from the aggregators, may I suggest popurls.com (better variety – Metafilter, Slashdot, digg, etc.) or your choice of from Origianlsignal’s bouquets of sources?
And for all you Techmeme fans, stop linking to Techmeme regulars. As it is, there is no way you are going to earn a living from deep think blogging and that means
you must not let others (A-listers and PR people) benefit from your labors as well.
A short guide to the perplexed to differentiate from the good and bad on Techmeme:The good onesNick Carr, Dave Winer, Shirky, Cringely
Tech BusinessGiga Om, Valleywag, Center Networks, Techdirt, Slashdot
The attention whores/self promotersCalacanis, Scoble
The Banal (aka Press Release/pay per post)Techcrunch, Product news
The Facebook GangDave Mcclure, NYT (and hordes of desperate application developers)
Labels: news aggregators, social news, techcrunch, techmeme
Techmeme’s leaderboard: A-listers, rejoice!
Techmeme has introduced something called the
Leaderboard, which will list 100 sources that had the most number of headlines appearing on the Techmeme homepage for the past month.
This new leaderboard is positioned squarely against Technorati’s Top 100 blog list, which has long been an indicator of blogging influence, and includes blogs who have attracted 3700 links during the past 6 months.
There are some who say that ranking bloggers on the basis of links is not ok.
Links can be bought, managed, whatever…
There there are people who will point out that
many top bloggers enjoy the first-mover advantage and rankings like
Technorati Top 100 and now Techmeme’s Leaderboard don’t reflect true and original opinion of the blogosphere.
Come to think of it: When Gabe Reviera, who founded Techmeme, came up with his indexes for his chain of selective topic aggregators, he must surely would have taken into account the Technorati Top 100 list (advantage no 1 for existing bloggers) and his own preferences (advantage no. 2 for silicon valley types and other sources).
Aggregators are never perfect.
This ‘A-lister upon A-lister’ arrangement leaves little scope for new voices and opinions to break in.
Chances are if a blogger wrote about the problems the iPhone had wouldn’t have made a blip on Techmeme’s homepage unless that blogger happens to be from Giozmodo, Engadget, Crunchgear and other and I don’t mean these aren’t fine blogs.
This A-list Economy forces writers, including this poor hack to take something a big-time blogger has written and then add to it, the implications being that your opinion is worth nothing for Techmeme and its type unless you toe somebody’s line.
That’s the A-listers’ tax most bloggers have to pay in order to be noticed.
There is always a gatekeeper and the gatekeeper has different shades for different people.
People will contend that only ‘original’ A-listers have something valuable to say and then maybe small bloggers like
yours ruefully will decide not to write so much and not to suck up to anyone anymore.
Aggregators be damned.
Related Reading:
Rules of the Superstar EconomyDownsides of the A-list pheneomenon: Link Bait is easyA-Listers: Navel Gazing dies hardLabels: news 2.0, news aggregators, techmeme
