Solo Blogging in the Age of Big Blogs
Louis Gray’s post today about the statistics of the Techmeme Leaderboard makes one thing pretty clear: the blogosphere is more and more dominated by the bigger blogs that have multiple authors on staff. The TechCrunch’s, Mashable’s, VentureBeat’s and CNet’s have definitely stepped up their game and it’s increasingly hard for individual bloggers to ranked highly there (but not impossible, as Louis, Steven Hodson, Mathew Ingram and others are ranked pretty well, too (including MG Siegler, before I started writing for VentureBeat).
Louis, of course, really just provides us more data for a phenomenon we were all already pretty much aware of. The top 10 sites on Techmeme weigh in at a total of 30%.
This makes a lot of people somewhat queasy – these bigger blogs are dominating a market that used to be more driven by personalities and conversation than business interests.
In the end, though, I have no problem with this. The big blogs are, at the end of the day, also staffed by bloggers. A lot of them started out as solo bloggers and then moved on to work for the big guys.
If anything, bloggers like Louis and Steven show pretty clearly that, as long as you write good stuff, you can still rank pretty nicely on Techmeme and of the best bloggers get a full-time job working for any of the bigger publications, then more power to them. And it’s also always good to remember that Techmeme is only one way of ranking blogs – maybe we are sometimes a bit too fixated on it.
That said, I think that a group of good bloggers banding together in a formal or informal network of individual blogs isn’t a bad thing either. More about that tomorrow…