Book Report

There's a ton of great information "out there" when it comes to tips and advice for budding bloggers, including "69 Questions to Ask to Review Your Blog". But before reviewing that little blog of yours, do you believe that 'traditional' blogs are dying? Have you ever taken a look at the soft white underbelly of the blogosphere and do you know how to write 'google-catching' posts?

A few posts ago, I promised you a "book report" when I finished CauseWired. Sorry to say, I have not finished the book. I got hung up on Page 68. I was reading, anticipating acquiring a bit of knowledge and a fresh look at interactive social media of all types. But when I hit Page 68... ah!

Everything I had previously thought about weblog success came crushing back into my brain: the author was writing about kiva.org...

Kiva grew slowly...expanded to 50 entrepreneurs in Uganda...a few bloggers picked up the story...Matt kept his day job...Then one morning, the traffic exploded. All the loans were sold out...$10,000...raised in a few hours

NOW PAY ATTENTION:

Looking at the logs, Matt realized that Kiva had been featured on the front page of the DailyKos, a leading liberal poltical blog with more than a million readers daily

Ladies & gentlemen, I rest my case! In order to kick-start your blog into the stratosphere, YOU NEED TO BE FEATURED ON ONE OF THOSE 'A-LIST' BLOGS, LIKE KOS!!! Kiva on Kos was like an author on Oprah: rags to riches!

When Wendy Cheng began her XiaXue blog, the turning point was when Blog*spot featured XiaXue as a blog to watch (or whatever it was they called it) ... when enough people are exposed to something, the buzz is born, and it catches on! Had Kos NOT featured kiva, the organization would have had to wait until somebody with some degree of clout featured it. Period!

Now, read on and understand the blogsophere even better:

Related Posts

• Social Media Predictions for 2009
• Advice For Young Reporters
• The New Media Landscape: Mass Professionalization

Every now and then people ask me "are you on Facebook" or "what's your MySpace" etc. Like anything else on this blog, if you look hard enough you'll find the information you seek. But for those who may not have the time or don't like to hunt for Easter Eggs, here's a list... I'm sure there are more but hopefully these will suffice for the time being.



Time for a Re-Mix:

Long before Michelle Malkin turned her website into a blog, I was a regular visitor. IMHO MM's established site helped popularize and build her blog faster than an extreme home makeover!

Tags: "Map: Welcome to the Blogosphere", Discover Magazine, blogs, blogging, Social Feedback, New York Magazine, Michelle Malkin, Rocketboom, Xiaxue, A-list, A-lister, Technorati, Wendy Cheng, Blog tools, Michelle Malkin, Xiaxue, Wendy Cheng, blogging, web2.0

Stephen Ornes writes in DISCOVER Magazine:

The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.

"Just as most people who start a novel never finish, most blogs are abandoned in less than a year, and many don’t make it past a few posts..." - Eric Berlin

The article includes a "Map" along with an article that cites popular sites DailyKos and Boingboing, while dismissing LiveJournal as a " blogging island is just barely in touch with the rest of the blogworld." The brightest light on the DISCOVER Blogosphere globe belongs to syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin. Michelle references this in her blog.

Now, here's what DISCOVER's Map article DOESN'T tell you:

"...In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences - and the advertising revenue they bring - go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity..." "...In scientific terms, this pattern is called "homeostasis" - the tendency of networked systems to become self-reinforcing. It’s the same thing you see in economies: the rich-get-richer problem..." - (New York Magazine: Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom)

"The system that was supposed to democratize media has instead become a sort of J.V. for the much-derided but secretly envied Main Stream Media [MSM]. The top bloggers have become, in some cases the pets, and in some cases the tormentors of, the writers in the front rank." - (Frank Giovinazzi: Blogosphere 2.0 -- The Means to Game the System that Nobody will Use)

We always hear about blogs that have "a lot of traffic." How much is a lot? Would you rather have 25 or 100 or 400 readers who check your blog everyday, or would you rather have 80,000 people click in on a daily basis? It think it's the QUALITY not the quantity: those faithful readers who show up every day and READ what you've posted.

I checked on two of my favorite bloggers, and you may be surprised at what I've found:

XiaXue (Wendy Cheng) continues to enjoy high numbers of incoming hits... she's up around 100,000 most of the time. UPDATE Jan 09: XX seems to be on a slight downward trend.




Michelle Malkin is a bright star in the blog Cosomos: in the past she has exceeded the MILLION hit-a-day mark, but for the first quarter of 2007, she and Xiaxue have been in roughly the same virtual territory. UPDATE Jan 09: MM holding steady at the 100,000 hits per day mark.

Okay: what secret do Wendy and Michelle share? LINKS! They have been LINKED to or simply MENTIONED in other blogs! XiaXue was catapulted into high-traffic territory when Blogger made her a "featured blogger." Michelle Malkin's columns and books were widely read before she turned her website into a blog... and everything she writes is food for thought and material for other keyboards.

Wendy and Michelle share something else: Television. Michelle has appeared on many FOX News programs while Wendy has served as co-host on Asia's popular "Girls Out Loud" series.

A make-up artist works his magic on Wendy Cheng, who blogs as Xiaxue (Falling Snow). Wendy's pop-star looks, eye-candy site design and outspoken attitude landed her a stint as spokesmodel for LocalBrand T-Shirts (Singapore). Wendy's blog is a curious mix of teen innocence, Singaporean savvy and truckstop banter! Oh, and she's SEXY too!

It's no big secret that SEX SELLS. A large chunk of internet business (successful internet business) deals in pornography. In researching the internet prior to launching the Capital Region People blog, I found certain blogs attracted more attention than others. The Newsblog or Political Blog is tops in the USA, closely followed by the Personal-Diary form, popularized by Stephanie Klein. Personal/Sexual and Game blogs rule the roost across much of Asia, most notably China where Mu Zimei, Furong JieJie and others have made their mark on Net history, and Singapore too, with Xiaxue and SarongPartyGirl.

The validation that SEX SELLS came for me the morning of August 2nd, 2005. I'm usually up early. I was checking traffic stats for CRP around 5am and noticed something wasn't quite right. An enormous "spike". What was it? Over 3-thousand hits? WHY? Was this a mistake? With a comfortable number of incoming links and an average of 400 unique hits a day, how could I not want more? CRP may not be the most popular blog around but I nurtured it into something bigger than I'd ever expected it to be. But not THIS big?!??!

Depending on the counter/tracking service, CRP got between 18,000 to 23,000 hits on that date. It wasn't blog-readers (blogders). It was websurfers Googling Sandra "Beth Geisel," the CBA teacher who had sex with young teen students. Because I had the foresight (a total accident) to post "The Doctor and The Teacher" on July 30th and "Media Circus" on July 31st, I was blessed with more visitors to CRP than I could ever have imagined!

I figured out what happened: sometime between the 31stof July and the 2nd of August, the search-engine "spiders" had visited the CRP blog and sucked up the terms "Sandra Geisel" and "Beth Geisel." Bingo! I couldn't have begged, borrowed or stole more hits! Top ranking on Google, Yahoo and FoxNews search engines! Incredible!

Social Feedback is important to bloggers, as well. An awful lot of bloggers pay an awful lot of attention to Technorati. Some won't blog on a particular topic unless it is in the "Technorati Top 10." Unless you want to artificially inflate traffic by posting about "Brrreeeport," this is a mistake! I've often blogged on a particular topic without any recognition or appreciable increase in traffic, then a few months later, a newspaper or magazine will print an article on that very topic and WHAM! Suddenly, new readers appear via search engines... hopefully, one or two will come back to visit again. Building a base readership takes time and patience!

"...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..."

Lucky you, you also-ran! You can read the entire New York Magazine article [just click HERE!]

Here is another reason to make Technorati tags a part of every blog post. According to Dave Sifry in his State of the Blogoshere Part II, Technorati has added a new Explore feature...This new explore tool includes postings from A-listers, such as Steve Rubel in the PR space, but it also includes bloggers that Sifry names "the magic middle" (also see Rubel’s post about this), formerly known as the B-list. In other words, these are blogs that have from 20 to 1,000 sites that link to them. [more from Communication Overtones]

A moment in Blog History: Blogger SCOBLE created the top searched phrase on technorati today. Brrreeeport beat Cheney, the Olympics, etc. Via his made-up word (brrreeeport) he’s seeing how fast links propogate through different search engines.

More NY Magazine links:
• Linkology: How the 50 Most Popular Blogs Are Related
• The Early Years: A Timeline of How Blogging All Began
• Five Cool Blogs to Check Out Now
• Meet the Bloggers
• The Long Tail Theory: Why B-list Blogs Can Make It, Too

Related Stories

New York Bloggers - Weblogs - The Download (11/10/2003)

Linkology - How the Most-Linked-To Blogs Relate (2/20/2006)

A Timeline of the History of Blogging -- New York Magazine (2/20/2006)

Gawker's Stalker - Rising Blog Kingdoms (3/15/2004)

Art to the Craft (2007)

Highlighted on NY MAG'S COVER:

Five Blogs to Check Out Meet the Bloggers The Early Years