Narcissus Called… He Wants His Blogosphere Back

Everyone loves fame (except for the wise ones), so it’s no surprise that there’s been an over abundance of “popular” lists and rankings emerging from all areas of the blogosphere lately.

The sad fact is that no one really cares.

Hot on the heels of the Techmeme Leaderboard, the newest offenders are Scoble and TechCrunch:

So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader. He sent the list around to people for comments – with his permission we’ve published it below.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim has the right idea:

Here’s some honesty. I love seeing Marketing Pilgrim on any list–like many bloggers–and I suggested MP be added to this new list. Guilty, as charged. But then I stopped and asked, “when will this blog-list insanity stop?” Do we really need to keep compiling lists of top blogs?

The blogosphere is all about the “long tail.” If we continue to highlight only the top 0.0001% blogs we do nothing but encourage the echo-chamber when instead we should be trying to delve deeper/wider into the blogosphere.

I’ve recently discovered a great trick to get past my disgust at such navel gazing… unsubscribing. Seriously, it works wonders to vote with your feet eyeballs attention and let the free market figure out when bloggers have spent too much time staring into the puddle of Narcissus.

There’s a wide world of incredible things happening online in terms of new platforms, new programs and new marketing paradigms… I’d rather focus on those and read bloggers who are doing the same instead of admiring the size of their feed numbers.

posted: 07 October 14
under: Blogging

  • "There’s a wide world of incredible things happening online in terms of new platforms, new programs and new marketing paradigms… I’d rather focus on those and read bloggers who are doing the same instead of admiring the size of their feed numbers."

    Word!

    Glad to discover you blog. Subscribed!
  • Sam, that would be like Clicks to Customers saying that CTR isn't important, it is how poetic your Adwords ads are that make the difference.

    In marketing statistics are important, though it is very hard currently to measure how influential or valuable a blog audience is.
  • Good analogy, Andy (Beard)... but I think this is a little different than the metrics we use to measure the success of search campaigns.

    Our campaigns, and the metrics we use to measure them or rate them, are based on performance. Quality is a component of those metrics, but even then quality is seen in the lens of performance.

    On the other hand, measuring something like the quality of blogs or the blogosphere is different because there are many more variables besides just performance. Besides, what I think might be indicate good "performance" on a blog (comment quality, type of readership, passion about a subject, etc) might be markedly different than what someone thinks indicates performance on a blog such as ad money generated, feed subscriber numbers, page views, etc.

    Thanks for dropping by, guys!
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