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It’s good to be original, but Techmeme needs me-too bloggers, too.

It’s Sunday afternoon and I thought it wasn’t going to happen, but Gabe Rivera himself has announced that we do have an official bitchmeme for the weekend.

So what happened?

Basically, Mark Evans wrote a post about why it is so difficult to write original blog posts and why there are so many me-too blog posts.

He lists five reasons (I leave out the details – you can find those in his post:

1. Writing original thought-provoking blog content is a challenge.
2. Many bloggers just want to be part of the conversation before it moves on.
3. Writing original content often provides a low return on investment.
4. Unless you blog for living like Mike Arrington or Erick Schonfeld, or you’re a tech reporter like Mathew Ingram or a conference junkie like Robert Scoble, you don’t have steady access to people and new ideas that often spawn original blog posts.
5. Vanity and Envy.

As much as writing original, insightful posts is every blogger’s goal, the reality is it’s difficult. Sometimes, the ideas aren’t flowing but you still need to feed the blog every day. Sometimes, jumping into the conversation of the day just feels good.

At the same time, however, writing original content is so much more satisfying because there’s a sense of accomplishment that you’ve been inspired by something you’ve read or talked about with someone about. It’s those nuggets of original content gold that make blogging so rewarding.

Dave Winer put this into slightly more direct terms:

What we used to call blogging is now just bullshit about recycled bullshit about recycled bullshit and on and on. Who bit who in the ass, never mind anything new or hard to comprehend, cause that’s not what we do. We aggregate eyeballs and clickthroughs and CPMs and god knows what else.

I agree with this to some degree, but I think the me-too bloggers are an important part of the Techmeme ecosystem, because they are the ones who make the interesting stories float to the top. 

Writing original content is not easy – never has been. In the end, though, those who write original content will be the bloggers that survive in the long run. Only writing me-too articles (like the one you are reading now), will, in the end, not make you into a blogging powerhouse.

But, Mark is right, if you look at the economics of blogging, where an individual blogger has to publish two or three articles a day, then it becomes clear the there just isn’t that much original thought to go around. It’s just too easy to just parrot the news than to come up with at least a new angle on it (which is what I try to do).

Yet, there is still another angle to this story. What’s the best way for new bloggers to get noticed by the big guys? You write about the same stories they do and you link to them (I think this is the Jason Calacanis school of thought).

But this is not proof that the end is near. Techmeme is still dominated by those headlines that really matter – except on the weekends where it’s a bit of a free for all. What really matter on Techmeme are the headlines - bylines give you little traffic and very few trackbacks – but you will get noticed by other bloggers – which is what me-too blogging is, in the end, really about. It’s those connections with other bloggers that will allow your original content to be noticed. If nobody notices your original content then you could just as well not write it (Update: see Steven Hodson’s post on this idea as well).

Summing up: a) yes – there are a lot of me-too bloggers, but b) it doesn’t really matter because all they do is push the interesting stories to the top – which makes them an important part of the Techmeme ecosystem.

All these people do is regurgitate other links and posts with a quip. When some person quoted one of my obscure articles on brand monitoring, my first thought was not of being flattered, but rather, “wow, is this dude hard up for things to post about”.

[...] we like it or not we become the me-too bloggers but that isn’t always so bad because as Frederic at The Last Podcast says  the me-too bloggers are an important part of the Techmeme ecosystem, because they are the [...]

[...] we like it or not we become the me-too bloggers but that isn’t always so bad because as Frederic at The Last Podcast says the me-too bloggers are an important part of the Techmeme ecosystem, because they are the ones who [...]