“I find it an extremely odd propositions in that we (the audience) are being asked to value the aggregation decisions of fairly arbitrary and otherwise insignificant (in the wider context) group of people.”

It’s called “editorialising”, and it’s what people have shown they want for several hundred years. Why do you think people would want something different?

The editorial process has always been about pulling together an audience by picking stuff that you think a particular group of people will like. It’s a process that is incredibly well understood by the traditional publishing world (AKA “main stream media”). That’s why it makes me laugh when new media people talk about “community building” as if it was something they’d discovered: magazines, newspapers and even TV channels have been in the business of finding and creating communities for decades.

As a magazine editor, you always have in mind who the audience is. You can even go to the extent of imagining an archetypal reader and writing specifically for him/her. It’s about getting them to want to think of themselves as “a Wired reader”, to make it part of their identity – to give them a sense of belonging to a tribe.

And the neat thing is that you can belong to many tribes. You can belong to the Mac using tribe, the Wired tribe – and yes, the BoingBoing tribe. And by perpetuating itself by taking stuff direct from its readership, BoingBoing reinforces this tribal feeling.

Most successful niche publishing efforts start off by “doing something for your mates” – that is, you create something for people like yourself, because there isn’t anything. But the process is the same: you edit, you choose from the vast range of stuff that’s out there according to your tastes and what you think your readers will like. They come back to you because they identify with your tastes.

You miss out a valuable step in the chain: the need to ensure that an audience (if that’s what you’re going for) can find you. For this, Google is useless: you’ll start off at the bottom of rankings. What gets you traffic is being linked to by something that already has lots of readers, who are likely to follow the link – and hopefully return.

And it’s that “return” process that lifts you. Only one in ten of the people who come for a single post will bother to read anything else. Of them, fewer still will subscribe to your RSS feed. I’ve been linked to by BoingBoing and other so-called A-Listers, and the effect is actually pretty minimal over time. You say a single day’s spike in traffic that, possibly, lasts a second day – then you’re back to the same-old numbers.

This is despite the link and no comment articles, not because of them. I first discovered the site when a friend linked toa review Cory had written (Mirrormask IIRC), and much prefer their homegrown stuff. Cory in particular does reviews, and even the odd bit of nvestigative/campaigning journalism.

Blogging, in its very nature, creates networks. I started through Livejournal, but now have a readership elsewhere completely independent of that. Sure, most of my readers are also people who blog about similar topics, or my actual personal friends. But in, for example, political blogging, the UK has a small number of A listers; Dale, Guido, Bloggerheads, Chicken Yoghurt. When starting up, I got noticed by all, simply by contributing. I never meant to take blogging that seriously, and still don’t, but I enjoy it, and am very happy with the way my writing and analyitical skills have improved because of it.

Sure, the a-list of mainstream blogs exists, but that’s because they’re actually good and well read. If they decline in quality or someoen else starts doing it better, then some of them will decline from top sites. And yes, I’m much more interested in what my friends like and link to (that’s why I still like and use Livejournal a lot), but who knows who my friends are?

Cory et al aggregate the very cool stuff and give it a wider audience, in the same way that Slashdot does. I’m happy with my traffic, adn I’m happy with the way the site is building up; I know that when I make the swtich to my own domain, traffic will increase and more attention will develope. That’s because I’ve used the network, made the links, established friendships, etc.

Blogging about blogging can beinteresting, but can also be offputting. I do it, we’re all prone to, but at the end of the day, write a decent article that people like, you’ll get attention. Navel gazing doesn’t get attention, but it can make for interesting discussions.

Building up readership through contacts with others, constuctive contributions and network/community building is far more important than being linked to/read by an a-lister.

Better several links over a course of time by mid-range blogs than one once only link from Cory. Although that link from Cory will be good for the ego.

I’ve been sort of frustrated for years about the surprise with which people greet the existence of a ‘most popular’ set of webloggers – as if it could actually be any other way, any list ordered by a metric has one fat end and one thin end – and also with the assertions that they make that this A-list is large and intractable. In my experience it’s anything but. If you don’t post for a couple of months you might as well have died. Even the creators of Blogger who still have weblogs don’t get the traffic they used to get in the day, because they don’t post as much. And there are weblogs created seven years ago that never got any traffic because they were personal or just not very interesting, so it’s not just that people who were there early win. They may have an advantage, but they still have to write consistently to maintain it. You only have to look at the rise and fall of the warbloggers to see the shifts that happen in this space. The whole ecology was overthrown by people like Glenn Reynolds four years ago and yet a great number of the highly popular punditry sites have just evaporated since. There’s movement here, you can fall from grace pretty rapidly.

And If you do post consistently interesting things or engage effectively with a community then you just do get more traffic. You might not make it into the top one thousand, but again – is anyone shocked by this – if there are fifty million people who are writing things, they can’t all be in the top thousand. And most people don’t even want to be – most people don’t even think of writing their weblogs as popularity contests – they’re using them to keep in touch with their grans or show off pictures of their holidays or to find a bunch of people who also like dressing up in drag or watching Star Trek.

I’m not denying the existence of popular and influential weblogs – that would be absurd – but I’m unclear what we should be doing about it. It’s far more – far more – fluid and open than pretty much any other media environment before. Anyone can write, and engage in discussions and get a few thousand readers if they’ve got the time and something to talk about. That’s never happened before. Some people will have advantages in this space. Not a shock.

I’m always suspicious of some of these reactions as well. It’s too easy to say that the people who complain most are the ones who feel hard done-by that they’re not A-listers, but that doesn’t mean there’s not an element of truth to it. Nick’s basically said as much – he can’t get any traffic and it’s everyone else’s fault. I just don’t really buy it. His site’s fine and everything, but it’s no better than mine or ten thousand other people’s. I don’t see what he was expecting. The irony of this whole situation being – of course – that he’s now got precisely the attention he said he couldn’t get, simply by writing something interesting.

It’s just a shame it had to be a bit trollish – old timers like me are increasingly smart to people’s attempts to get linked to by being controversial or picking a fight. We tend to not link to the posts nowadays on the basis that they give the person we disagree with credibility – and specifically traffic – that they generally don’t deserve.

‘I’d actually much rather value a list of what my friends think is cool and a list of the overall most interesting on the entire Internet via ‘wisdom of crowd’/etc.’

If you have a few friends writing del.icio.us pages, this is pretty easily done. http://taint.org/wk/SpicyLinks describes it:

‘SpicyLinks is an automated link-blog summariser. It reads other people’s link-blogs, so you don’t have to, and reports the stuff that prove popular in your personal collection of sources.

It’s similar to Populicious, but that really misses the point, in my opinion. I don’t particularly want to know what _everyone_ is pointing at; I want to know what a selected set of trusted sources, with good taste, are pointing at.’