In his recent post, Revolting Peasant Metaphor, Sterling Camden at Chip's Quips hits a significant nail on the head of an issue I've written about a few times--over-ranking blog rankings. Beside that, I like his ambiguous use of the word "revolting."
Is he making it a verb or an adjective?
If 50 million bloggers all want to be top-rated, then the blogosphere becomes nothing more than a humongous shouting match. That seems to me, would be a pretty revolting development because it takes attention to the kind of rankings that are used by TV networks, and loses the power of the backyard fence conversation. In the former case, a bunch of slick people in nice suits uses every trick they can cook up to capture your eyeballs. In the latter, two folks build trust, credibility and an enduring relationship through simple, candid conversations.
If you want to be an A-Lister, there's lots you can do. First, enrich me by buying the book. It's filled with rank-boosting tactics: Post often. Be controversial. Link to Scoble, Arrington and someone at BoingBoing. Join every conversation at the top of the Technorati daily list. and at TechMeme.
Scoble and Arrington are the two most popular bloggers I know. I don't really know there numbers, but I'd guess both get more than 25,000 visitors a day. They achieve this by contributing a great deal of incite and information relevant to a very large number of people.
This sounds pretty phenomenal until you realize all the people, all the people, all over the world who DON'T read either blog. In fact, every day and Arrington probably reach increasingly smaller percentages of the total blogosphere.
But I have a hunch that's not what most people want from their blogs. I think people just want to be heard and to start a few simple conversations like two guys chatting over their backyard fence who share a few similar interests. For example, if Patti in Petaluma is passionate about hummingbirds and she blogs about it, she's delighted when she gets an enthusiastic comment from Bruce in Boise or Lilly in London. Maybe there's only three of them at first, but they all blog and over time there's may 30 hummingbird lovers, sharing their passion and some picture and 1st-person experiences. They fly very low on the Technorati barometer, but who cares? These hummingbird lovers are relevant to each other. They learn and grow from each other. The blogs have allowed a very small global community to form.
If they wanted rankings, one could claim he or she had sex with a rock star or politician, maybe even toss up a video. Then they would gain rankings at about the same rate that they lose relevance to their chosen community.
This argument extends to me to business bloggers. Very few companies cater to all economic, demographic, geographic, sociographic categories of humanity. Most business cater to very small audiences and they can reach them--and be reached by them--more efficiently, more effectively and more economically through blogs than through any other choice.
Sterling's point is quite quote good. Ratings are over-rated, or so it seems to me.
