Since I was vocal in my dislike of Adam Green’s last idea, let me be equally vocal about my interest in his new idea.

He has a theory that bloggers that are not on the so-called A-List tend to cross-link to each other on certain topics, thereby creating link clusters that eventually allow some of those bloggers to accumulate enough flow to move up bloggers hill. He plans on testing that theory to see what it can tell us about linking behavior in the blogosphere.

Read his post, because it is very interesting and has a lot more details, but here’s the part that grabbed my attention:

When a new area of interest develops, such as what we are now seeing with OPML reading lists, a group of mutually linking bloggers emerges. If one of these bloggers is an A-lister, then the majority of the links point to his or her posts on the subject. If, on the other hand, the inter-linkers are all middle ranked bloggers, let’s call them M-listers, they tend to link to each other fairly liberally. As new people become interested in the subject, they find these clusters of posts (memetracking sites do a great job of revealing M-list clusters), and also link to many of the blogs in the cluster, since there is no one recognizable A-lister to link to exclusively. In time the M-lister who is most prolific on this subject, but not necessarily the best writer or scobler, acquires even more links. Eventually this blogger becomes the authority on the subject, and even A-listers take note and deliver links. The resulting accumulation of links are enough to reach A-list status. Thus we have a slow bubbling up from the middle, rather than the overnight success story so often told by analysts.

I think there’s a lot of logic to this argument. In fact, it is the semi-scientific explanation of the “wagon train” approach to blog building that I have been writing about and experiencing with some of my blogosphere friends.

On the whole, I have come around largely to Steve Rubel’s way of thinking– that focusing on traffic is backwards. That you need to focus on content, effort and relationships, and then let the traffic come naturally. But along with doing all of that, there remains the fact that the best way readers will find out about your content and effort is via links, which sometimes come via relationships.

And that’s what intrigues me about Adam’s experiment.

My friend and fellow wagon trainer Mathew Ingram is also interested in Adam’s experiment and makes some good points about the announcement of the experiment being a part of the experiment:

Interestingly enough, of course, Adam linked to Scoble’s post about the redesign of memeorandum.com, and that link in turn helped get him onto memeorandum as a sub-link to Scoble’s post. In a convoluted sort of way, Adam’s own discussion of this kind of thing is itself an example of what is being discussed.

As long as there’s no more talk of any advisory boards and whatnot, sign me up.

I’ll play.

Eric Scalf has a great read on the transition from journaling to blogging.

I find his discussion of finding your target audience especially compelling. For me, the central difference between writing a journal (using the traditional definition) and a blog is the audience. A journal seems more like the online version of a diary (more on that below). Granted, the fact that it’s online indicates that the writer wants someone to read it. But the structure and the initial thought process is the same as the diary under the mattress: to chronicle your experiences for future reflection. In other words, it’s writing from the outside in.

Journaling is a powerful thing. Many years ago, I read two journals every day, written by people I don’t know. The first, The Semi-Existence of Byron, was written by a guy from Denton, Texas. I really got into his stories and the characters he wrote about. It was a really sad day for me when he quit writing. The link is still in my bookmarks, many years later.

The other was by a woman named (at least on the net) Tracy Lee. She was a photographer, wife and mother. I followed her story until she stopped writing it, around the time her husband graduated from law school.

Those were the two that I read consistently for the longest period of time, but I read others as well.

For a while I read the journal of a lady who was fighting cancer. Ultimately, she lost. Bob Clay and I were so touched by her story that we wrote a song about it.

Later I came across and followed another person’s struggle with cancer. I was sad when her son posted that she had lost her battle.

Heck, I even wrote a five day journal about the last time I saw my mother alive.

So I’m all about journals and the beauty of the personal word. Because they are written from the outside in, journals are generally more powerful on a personal level than blogs.

When blogging, you are writing not from the outside in, but from the inside out. You are adding your voice to a series of conversations about the topics that interest you. It is, by definition and by design, a communal experience.

In other words, while it’s possible for one person, with no interaction with others, to write a journal, I don’t think you can say the same about a blog. Blogs require the interaction that comes from links, comments and cross-blog dialog.

Which mean, simply, that blogs require at least some readers.

And that is why defining your audience is so important. To attract readers more effectively, we need to figure out who were are writing to. Maybe it’s just your friends and family, maybe it’s people who share your hobbies and other interests. Maybe it’s both.

The group can be narrow or fairly broad, but once we define who we’re writing for, we can begin to test our ideas for stories and topics against what we know about our target audience. Because blogs are no different that any other product or service, the more you please your customers, the more customers you will have.