This is Not the Summer Camp I Remember

Deconstructing Dave

So Dave and Scoble (still on his Memeorandum hiatus) were talking. They agreed that the blogosphere has become as flammable as mailing lists and usenet newsgroups. I don’t really agree with that, but this isn’t a poll.

Dave says there are some topics that you can’t talk about without inciting a flame-war, and he does his best not to incite one by not mentioning what those topics are. At least not directly.

Then he says there aren’t many people doing the flaming, but that they control discourse because they control who gets to “speak at the conferences.”

Ah, conferences. Camps, mashups, gatherings, happening, Techcrunches. We’re back on the “my nerd camp is better than your nerd camp thing,” with an ironic twist of Gatekeeping thrown in for good measure.

I have some questions about these conferences that I hope someone will answer for me.

Maybe these Conferences are…Different

But let me digress just a little. I typically give between 15-20 speeches a year. Not in Mike Arrington‘s back yard- I’ll never make it on that invitation list. Rather, I speak at conferences, seminars and conventions about boring things like real estate development and the music business. These events are attended by people in the business, but not really because they are the place to be seen or because they are more fun than a party at Mike’s place.

The truth is that people attend them primarily to meet the continuing education requirements mandated by their licensing state. Sure, there’s a lot of networking at some of the big ones, but most of the time getting required continuing education hours is the focus.

Of course, this guarantees an audience as people who would prefer to be elsewhere have to get so many hours of continuing education a year.

I speak at these events not because I think they’re more fun than Disneyland, but because sometimes people hear me speak and then hire me to do their legal work. It’s marketing, plain and simple.

The Cost of Being Seen

Which brings me back to the conferences Dave is talking about. Since he is talking about flaming in the context of the blogosphere, I assume these conferences are related at least in some material way to blogging and the blogosphere.

Who goes to these things? Do they pay lots of money to attend? Is it like a geek Oscar party where it not the party but the being invited that counts? Are there actual customers in attendance or only vendors and journalist types? Who are the customers of a conference about blogging? Isn’t it a little like preaching to the choir?

How many people attend these things? Is there a big group of people who travel from one to the next like some sort of Grateful Geek nation? Are there Daveheads? Is Dave a bigger celebrity than Ken? If they played checkers, who would win?

Do the people who attend these conferences have jobs? Is going to these conferences a part of their job? Do their companies pay for them to go to these conferences? Can I get a gig like that?

OK, so a lot of that is tongue in cheek.

But I don’t get the turf wars that seem to be ongoing over these conferences, camps, mashups, whatever the unnecessary synonym of the day is. What is the turf that someone is trying to protect? And why?

And One More Thing

And here’s another thing, what kind of conference lets somebody flame someone else from the podium without giving the recipient a chance to respond? I’ve never been to nerd camp but I have logged hundreds of hours behind the podium and I have never once witnessed anything like that- and if you think the egos at nerd camp are bigger than the ones at law or music camp, think again.

In fact, I have seen sponsors make time for someone who wasn’t on the agenda to present an opposing view point. How can we triangulate from a single data point?

Unless these conference are more cage match than college, anyone who lets people stand up and trash someone else just because they don’t get along isn’t doing a very good job of running a conference.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

I don’t understand about 80% of what Dave and Scoble were talking about that got distilled into Dave’s post, but I still agree with Dave that once the issue becomes one of personality instead of issues, the conversation has been irreparably tainted and it is time to find someone else to talk to.

I enjoy the conversational nature of the blogosphere, and I particularly enjoy hearing someone explain why I need to rethink my position about things. Otherwise it’s just one big echo chamber. But some people just can’t handle disagreement, and so anyone who disagrees must be stupid or evil. I just tune those folks out, which makes them even madder. Shake the scorpion a little and it will sting itself to death. And all that.

So Give Me the Goods

What am I missing about these conferences that gets everybody in a tither?

UPDATE: Christopher Carfi taught me most of what I have been able to gather about these conferences via this excellent post, which I came across just now. I still don’t really know what an unconference is. Is is like 7-Up?

Triangulating Around the Flattened Earth

Jim McGee talks about triangulation and the citizen media movement represented by the blogosphere.

I have always tended to believe the consistencies that arise among competing forces, particularly when those forces are non-cooperative with each other and have non-parallel goals. Jim talks about how a wide and diverse collection of viewpoints can help you navigate through the often noisy and conflicting blogosphere.

Jim’s post is thought provoking, and the article he wrote for the Enterprise Systems Journal (linked in his post) is as well.

Looking Through You

Your lips are moving
I cannot hear
You voice is soothing
But the words aren’t clear
You don’t sound different
I’ve learned the game
I’m looking through you
You’re not the same
– The Beatles

Seth Finkelstein and Ethan Johnson are talking about marginalization in the blogosphere.

This is a complex and touchy issue, but here are my thoughts.

Common Sense and Fairness

Many, many times I have read things on a blog that have already been talked to death on other blogs. What’s OK and not OK in that situation is a “know it when you see it” sort of thing. Clearly if someone links to another blogger or engages him in a cross-blog conversation, then it would be wrong of him to restate what was said as if it were his own original thought.

On the other hand, if I talk about an issue today, some other blogger might talk about the same issue next week or next month, perhaps in a similar fashion, without ever having seen my post. The blogosphere is a big place and it’s impossible to know what everybody said today, much less in the past.

Maybe I’m being naive again, but I think if you apply common sense and fairness, these things will take care of themselves. And if you don’t, someone (be it Seth, Ethan, Kent or somebody we don’t know yet) will probably let you know.

But No Footnotes Please

Blogs are not generally research articles (thank goodness). But fairness is fairness, so some rules should apply.

It boils down to a couple of things.

First, the whole greater mindshare/Gatekeeper thing. I’ve had my say about that issue and, pending any new perspectives, I’m not going to rehash it all over again. It’s there. It’s not as bad as some think. Most of it is natural; a little bit of it is designed to exclude. But you can get inside the gates. Yada, yada, yada.

More importantly, and the thing this conversation makes me wonder about, is whether there is some implied duty to do a Technorati or Google search before you post something to see if someone else has already covered it (or in the case of a new discovery, already dis-covered it).

How Much is Enough

I generally search a little on a topic before I post on it to make sure I have at least most of my facts right and to look for other relevant and helpful links. Most of the time, I do this via a Technorati tag search. Once in a while (though much less often) I’ll do a Google search. But I don’t know that a search should be a requirement prior to posting about a topic.

It’s one thing if someone knows another writer has uncovered something new. In that case, I think a link ought to be included back to the original story. But the internet is a big place and if I have to do vast research before posting on something, then I’m not going to post very much.

If I were to accidentally jump to the front of the line on an issue, however, I would hope someone would let me know in an email or Comment, in which case I would (and should) supplement with a mention, link, etc.

Looking Through

I fully understand the frustration that occurs when someone posts something that you’ve already covered and it gets treated like earth shattering news. I protested (mildly) via satire when that happened about this very same Gatekeeper issue.

I don’t want to come off sounding like I can’t relate to the desire to be heard, because I can. And whether I write this blog for another year or 20 years, I will always do what I can to find and invite new voices to the table.

Sure, some people (and I think it’s a relatively small number) hand out links like medals. But given the communal nature of the blogosphere, those folks are their own worst enemy. And their numbers will decline over time as the blogosphere continues to flatten.

Just because someone doesn’t speak to you doesn’t mean they are ignoring you. They just may not have seen you.

Podcaster’s Hill

Doc Searls had some very nice things to say about my podcast. Thanks Doc, I really appreciate it.

As I mentioned on my most recent podcast and as Doc mentioned in his post, it’s sort of hard to get a podcast started. With blogs, you can tell via comments and links and whatnot roughly how many people are reading and responding to what you write.

With podcasting, it’s a little harder to tell. Yes, you get subscriber numbers (I forgot they made numbers that low), but a lot of people, myself included, listen to podcasts via their computer, without subscribing. Heck, I don’t even own an iPod. Plus, podcasts are not yet the interactive creations that blogs are, so there’s less of a chance for people to give you feedback.

Doc is a member of my favorite podcast, the Gillmor Gang, and has some podcast related content on one of his web sites. I listen to the Gillmor Gang regularly and have wondered aloud why no one has done a Texas or other regional version of the group tech podcast. As an aside, if anyone who knows how to do a group podcast is interested in talking about doing one, drop me a line.

Anyway, I have been doing my RanchoCast podcasts since early December of last year. The mix is country rock, Americana, tech talk and blues. Over the past few episodes (and primarily on the last one), I have started talking a bit more about topics I have written about here. Surprisingly (at least to me), a few people have written me to say they enjoyed that part of the episode. Richard Querin tells me I explained my position on the whole Gatekeeper business better verbally than I did in writing.

All of this got me thinking a little about my podcast strategy.

Here’s my current plan, but I welcome suggestions. I’m figuring this out as we go, so don’t hesitate to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.

First, I am going to make tech talk a regular part of the mix. My ideal split would be about 60/40 music to tech talk. I’d love to have guests, but I think it would be presumptive to think anyone would want to guest on my podcast. But if you write or think about tech and would like to guest, drop me a line. I would be happy to have any of the Web 2.0 developers on to talk about their product (just be ready to answer my first question: other than ads, what are your revenue streams?). So guests or not, I’m going to make tech talk a slightly bigger part of the mix.

Second, I am going to excerpt the non-music stuff and make it available separately- like I did with part of the tech talk last time. I don’t know if this is necessary, but I don’t want to lose listeners who only want to hear the tech talk- particularly if I have guests. If it looks like I should tweak the split or even split the podcast in two (I’d probably just alternate weekly between talking and doing music), I’ll consider that as well.

Third, I am going to do what I can to join up (either as a guest or in a group thing) with some other podcasters. I don’t know what opportunities are out there, but I am going to look around for them. I really like the give and take of the Gillmor Gang and would love to be a part of something similar to that. Of course, that’s sort of like saying I want to do something similar to David Letterman. So I’ll keep my expectations in check.

The more experience I get listening to and creating podcasts, the more I enjoy them.

So that’s my current plan. Please let me know if I’ve got it all wrong, or if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

Blogospat II: When Geeks Attack

catboxing So Dave Winer says there are too many blogospats and calls out Nick Carr for being snarky. I don’t know what snarky means and I’m not interested enough in learning an unnecessary synonym to go look it up, but I don’t think it’s a compliment.

I seem to either wildly disagree or wildly agree with whatever Nick writes, and he may be as smart as his bio. Once again, I’m not interested enough to try to figure it out. I find smartness for smartness sake profoundly boring. But clearly he got under Dave’s skin like an imaginary advisory board.

Dave then goes on to dump on Memeorandum because there are too many stupid people posting there. So Dave is mad at Nick who might be really smart for posting stupid things on a site that used to be the exclusive realm of smart people until all the newbies “arrived (and arrived and arrived and on and on).”

It’s very confusing, but then I’m one of the stupid newbies, so that’s not surprising. But I jumped to Scoble’s defense in yesterday’s blogospat, so I guess Dave needs one of those shirts that says “I’m with Stupid.”

Then Scoble reads Dave’s words of wisdom and decides to take a Memeorandum break in favor of RSS feeds because reading feeds from smart people lets you learn about the Hubble telescope and get smarter.

And then Scoble says smart people in his RSS feeds “could give a f**k about all the traffic.” I need to get to Bloglines quick because I’m feeling stupider by the minute. Fish don’t care about water either, at least until it dries up.

By my count most of the bloggers who wrote about yesterday’s blogospat were solidly on Scoble’s side. I don’t think you can avoid people who use the so called “Dvorak approach” (though proving for the third time in one post that I’m stupid, I like to read John’s stuff). That sort exists in the real world and perhaps in even greater quantities in the remote blogosphere. If you have any sort of a profile, unfair and unfounded criticism comes with the territory. But as long as you believe you’re doing the right thing and as long as you have people (even stupid ones) in your corner, you just ignore all the foolishness.

Smart is like pretty- it is as it does.

I think all this fighting over who knows more about tech, or whose nerd camp is better or whose IQ is only 145 is silly- and I’m a geek. I can’t imagine how it looks to a regular person who happens by.

But look on the bright side. If someone wanted to kick it old school, without being bothered by all these newbies, a few more blogospats ought to do the trick.

Bloglogic and the Litmus Test for Link Love

litmus Doc Searls adds his perspective to Dave Wallace’s post about second opinion, affirmative traction, connections and flow.

Dave did a little analysis of his traffic after being mentioned in one of Mathew Ingram‘s second opinion posts and concludes that he got a little subscriber boost, but that the better by-product of such links is the initial connection that might lead someone to return to a blog because of the content.

Doc points out that he doesn’t blog for traffic, popularity or money. He blogs for effect- to get topics he cares about on the conversational agenda. That’s a true statement for Doc, as well as a lot of us who aren’t trying to monetize our blogs. It’s a synopsis of the approach to blog building that I have ended up with, by one of the guys who taught it to me.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.

Goals and Focus are Not the Same Thing

Many people on both sides of the traffic argument confuse a focus with a goal. As a result they often talk across each other.

Here’s what I mean by that.

For all the reasons I’ve talked about recently, making traffic and links your focus is not the most effective way to build a blog. Most of the people who have been at the table when we’ve talked about it seem to agree with that.

But just because traffic and links aren’t the focus doesn’t mean they aren’t legitimate goals. To tell someone that traffic and links don’t matter at all is a little like a rich guy telling a poor guy not to be so concerned about money. I don’t obsess about money, but making some is certainly one of my goals when I head out the door each weekday morning.

The key is to have many goals, but a narrow focus.

The Litmus Test

Here’s the only question you have to answer to determine whether traffic is one of your blogging goals: would you blog happily for an extended time if no one ever read your blog? No Comments, no clicks, no links. Just a dark corner of cyberspace where your blog sits idle and completely unnoticed.

If the answer is yes, then traffic is not one of your goals. And you are either fooling yourself or you are a rare bird indeed. Let’s do some bloglogic: if blogging is conversation and conversation takes at least two people, then is an unread blog really a blog?

That’s not to say that traffic is the be all, end all of blogging. It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. To say it is is like joining a conversation with the hidden agenda of selling something to your new friends. It might work for a while, until you show your hand. Then it all falls apart.

So What’s for Dinner?

Here’s how I see our little corner of the blogosphere. There are a lot of bloggers, including, but not limited to, Doc, Scoble, Stowe Boyd (who, just for the record, is seriously link obsessed), who live pretty close to where the tech action is, have jobs that are at least somewhat related to tech and, by now, all know or know of each other through non-blog means. There are others who have joined the party to varying degrees over the months (we have to talk in months when speaking of the blogosphere), including, but not limited to, Steve Rubel, Dwight Silverman, Fred Wilson (who needs to check out Vault Radio), myself and a few of my fellow wagon trainers. This is the blogosphere’s equivalent of the Friday night dinner group. Some sit at the head of the table, some sit with me at the foot of the table (which, having done my time at the kiddie table, is not such a bad place to sit), but we’re all involved in the conversation.

When the longtime members get to the table, there’s no need for an introduction or even a greeting. They just fall into comfortable conversation. There’s nothing in the world wrong with that- it’s just the way life, dinner groups and the blogosphere work. In fact, the prospect of going to dinner is what leads a lot of us to the blogosphere.

But if you’re new to the party, you have to walk up and say hello- just like you would in the real world. I have learned that the diners will gladly welcome you into the group if you can carry on an interesting conversation, but they don’t sit at the table and watch the door for someone new to walk through.

You come in, say hello and over time earn your stripes. Again, that’s the way it should be.

The Beautiful Chair

But just like at the dinner table, it’s polite to wait to be asked to sit down. It’s very rewarding when one of the old guard pulls out a chair and it’s equally rewarding to pull out a chair for someone you find interesting. And in the blogosphere, the chair is made of traffic and links.

So I think it’s perfectly normal to have traffic and links as a goal, or at least something you hope for. Because they are the by-product of being a part of the conversation. Sure, they matter more to the new person at the table. But that’s usually because he or she is striving for acceptance.

It’s a little intimidating to walk up to a table where people who know each other are talking. It’s also a little scary to start blogging in a room full of people who are already deep in conversation. All of us need to remember the way it felt when we hit the “Publish” button on our first blog post.

So Enjoy Links

Give ’em. Get ’em. Love ’em. Just remember they are evidence of the thing and not the thing itself.

And look forward to the Friday night dinners. There’s a lot of fun to be had. Even at the foot of the table

In a Word, No

Are we men or are we children- that is this morning’s question.

inawordno Because the little blogospats that are popping up all over the blogosphere sound more like my kids fighting over a Polly Pocket than anything resembling reasoned conversation.

Roy Schestowitz, all worked up because Scoble can’t build a computer out of wood and pine sap, comes up with a sentence that would make Andrew Keen proud:

Scoble only understands computers as a user, rarely realising the underlying issues in depth.

Then he spends a couple of paragraphs bashing the crap out of Scoble without a hint of support or reasoned discussion.

Roy, while I did build the computer I’m writing this on (but not with wood and sap), and while I did write software back in the day, I also learned a little about conversation and debate somewhere along the way. And here’s something right out of Persuasion 101: the second you stop talking about the issue and start attacking your opponent, you have lost. Game over.

It’s the oldest trick in the book: I can’t win on the facts so I’ll just call him names. Give me back my Polly Pocket, you meanie!

Once that happens, even if you’re right, you’re still wrong (cue Dave Winer to give me the existentialists’ view on being right).

Of course in this case you’re not right.

Saying that Scoble is not fit to talk about technology is like saying a librarian is not competent to talk about books. Not to mention the fact that if Scoble isn’t fit to talk about tech, then we better go ahead and shut down the blogosphere, because neither are any of the rest of us.

There’s saying something really wrong, and then there’s just wrong.

10/90 and the Rule of the Reallies

I’ve been thinking more today about the conversation we had recently about the whole traffic verses content thing where blog building is concerned. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the way choice of words affects the debate.

Last night, I talked a little to Seth Finkelstein and Brian Clark via our respective posts on the topic and the Comments thereto, and Brian and I concluded that most of us are largely preaching from the same book when it comes to content, traffic, links and the other aspects of blog building.

But today I started thinking that maybe I did short change the whole links business by focusing almost entirely on content. Yes, good content is the best way to cultivate links. Yes, I still believe the primary focus should be on content. I particularly enjoyed the conversation today on the Voice From the Cubicle podcast about writing a lot of content before you launch your blog or other website. As I said last night, far too many of these Web 2.0 science projects are tossing up web pages prematurely.

But as I also said last night, word of mouth is the best way to attract readers and links are, for better or worse, the blogosphere’s word of mouth.

All of which leads me to two points. One that I’ve mentioned in passing before and one that is new.

Let’s talk some about links. Not as the front-end goal but as a back end test to see what sort of content creates the word of mouth buzz that leads to more cross-blog conversation and, of course, to more inbound links.

The 10/90 Rule

I’ve mentioned this before, but I want to focus on it today. I believe, based on my experience and observations, that for most bloggers 10% of your posts will generate 90% of your links. Most posts will generate a link or two and maybe a couple of Comments, but the large majority of most bloggers’ inbound links will result from a small percentage of their posts.

The reason is pretty obvious. Once something gets raised in the distributed conversations that are the purpose and goal of the blogosphere, more and more people write about it and before long you have a ton of cross links, Comments and other conversational by-product.

The trick, of course, is to figure out a pattern that might make it easier to write more of those 10/90 posts.

One thing I have absolutely concluded is that it’s very hard to predict what will be a 10/90 post based on how hard it was to write or how much effort was put into it. Just because I think I’ve written a 10/90 post doesn’t mean anyone else will think so.

For example, when I published My Mobile Approach the other day, it was the culmination of around 6 hours of research and implementation of my mobile applications. I thought that post would jump start all kinds of conversations about mobile technology, and that I would learn about all kinds of mobile applications to add to my mobile application list. It got one Comment and died.

On the other hand, I have written many posts in just a few minutes that got picked up and resulted in a bunch of conversation. I wrote my Gatekeepers Strike Back post in about 10 minutes and it got all kinds of run.

The pattern, if there is one, is well hidden. But I have a working theory about it. There’s nothing revolutionary here, just my take on some things I’ve read, experienced and observed.

The Rule of the Reallies

The posts, both here and in other blogs I read, that seem to get legs on any consistent basis are the ones that do one of four things really well (thus the name the Rule of the Reallies):

1) Say something really right

Not in an arrogant, rock-star kind of way. And not in an I’m smarter than you kind of way. But in a “yes, that’s exactly right!” sort of way. For example, I was thinking about writing more on Web 2.0 this morning, until I saw Scott Karp’s post. He said what I was thinking, only better than I would have.

Being really right is what got Steve Rubel and Om Malik to the top of bloggers hill. Listen to 5 minutes of any of the many podcasts Steve was on yesterday and you’ll realize very quickly that he’s one smart, thoughtful guy.

My other smart blog of the moment is Techdirt– it seems like every time I read a post there, like this one for example, I feel like pumping my fist in the air and saying “yeah, that’s it!” I find a lot of the same sort of thing at Phil Sim‘s blog, Mathew Ingram‘s blog, Amy Gahran‘s blog(s), Zoli Erdos‘ blog and Seth Finkelstein‘s blog, among many others. It’s easy to toss up a link and restate the conversation, but these folks, even when they are disagreeing, always make good, sound points. You’ll never hear them telling you how smart they are- they just prove it day after day.

2) Say something really wrong

The other way for a post to get legs is to say something really wrong, so people have to correct you. Bloggers are like my mother the English teacher- they have the irresistable impulse to correct you when you say something wrong (Scott and Mathew have a grand time correcting each other).

Of course, by wrong I don’t really mean wrong. I mean something that other people will strongly disagree with. For example, when I saw Adam Green’s memetracker blog post, I just about fell over my chair trying to get a response written and published- and this is at least the third time I have linked to that one post. (As an aside, I actually agree with most of Adam’s ideas.)

Another example is Dennis Howlett’s post dumping on Memeorandum. I beat my keyboard to death responding to, and linking to, that post.

The point is not that I’m right and they’re wrong, because these are just opinions and there are very few wrong opinions. The point is that, without link baiting or employing any other pseudo-mind tricks, those posts created the overwhelming need to talk about it.

The results of course are Comments, links and other interaction.

3) Say something really funny

This one of the reallies is sadly ignored, at least in the tech corner of the blogosphere. Funny is one of the most effective ways to get noticed and to generate a word of mouth buzz. If you can combine funny with one of the other reallies, you have doubled or tripled the potential for buzz generation.

I know and like Kevin Hales, but this post made me notice and link to his blog. This one and more like it got him on my daily reading list.

I think a funny techish blog, maybe even using bunnies, would be very popular, very quickly.

4) Say Something really helpful

People love it when you do something that makes their life easier. There are a lot of blogs I read every day because they make it easier for me to find out about stuff, including Thomas Hawk (media and photography), Download Squad (software) and Techcrunch (new play dough creations).

The helpful post is probably the hardest to write, but it will have a longer shelf life as far as the conversation goes.

So What Does it Mean for Blog Building

It means that slow and steady is the way to the top of bloggers hill. And it means that while you can’t predict which posts will be your 10/90 ones, if you stay reasonably close to the reallies, the climb might be a little easier.

Really.

That Traffic Thing Again

So Brian Clark is mad at Steve Rubel for saying that blogging is not about traffic in the face of Brian’s Trading Words for Traffic report. Scoble chimes in to say that, while Brian’s report is useful, Steve is right. Which is sort of what I said last night.

Let’s think about this for a minute. I believe the four of us are agreeing a lot more than we’re disagreeing.

Lessons Learned on Bloggers Hill

As I’ve worked on building Newsome.Org, I’ve learned some things I didn’t know when I started. As a matter of fact, a lot of the things I now believe about blog building would have been highly counterintuitive to me back then.

For example, when I started blogging, I thought the object was to attract as many eyeballs to Newsome.Org as quickly as possible. When I developed web sites back in Bubble 1.0, that was certainly the goal. My initial plan was to use the same tools that worked so well for me back then to draw traffic to my blog. What I didn’t yet realize is that a blog is not a static experience, where one guy talks and everyone else sits in rapt attention. Rather, a blog is just one part of a greater community which feeds and is fed by other blogs and the bloggers who write them. In other words, you aren’t asking people to come to your blog just to read what you have to say- you want them to read first and then write, comment and link. It’s a many-sided conversation, which takes longer to get going than a speech or a sermon.

Through that trial and error (and thanks to some helpful advice from the Roberts and Steves and Oms of the world) I have learned that focusing primarily on traffic is not the way to build a blog. If you obsess on traffic, you won’t get the flow you hope for right away, and even if you did, it wouldn’t stay. People notice a car wreck immediately, but they don’t make it a point to come back to the place where they saw it. It’s immediate interest, but it’s also fleeting interest. On the other hand, people gravitate to a new park or other destination site more slowly, but they come back a lot.

One of the things a lot of these Web 2.0 companies/science projects are doing very wrong is throwing their web page up with little more than a logo. People stop by, but they don’t come back. And it’s hard to open twice.

After you get your content ready for a grand opening, then you want traffic. The best way to get traffic is by word of mouth, and, for better or worse, links are the blogosphere’s word of mouth. So I am not about to say that links aren’t important- they absolutely are. But it’s hard to grow links in a laboratory. You need to let them grow naturally.

And of course it would help if Technorati got a little more reliable at aggregating the ones you get. I am in the process of concluding that Technorati’s constant indexing breakdowns are a much bigger impediment to building a really successful blog than the lack of a link from a proverbial A-Lister. But that’s a topic for another post. And it will be.

Now About that Report

I read Brian’s report the night it was published, and some, but not all, of what it says is both logical and consistent with my current thinking. The biggest problem, for me and perhaps for Steve as well, is the link baiting part. Most bloggers you’d want to link bait know exactly when they’re being baited and most of them won’t bite. I’ve been link-baited a couple of times. Sometimes I responded (honestly because I was honored that anyone would go to the trouble of link baiting me), but sometimes I didn’t. Say what you will, but writing with the primary goal of mind-tricking someone into linking to you doesn’t work very well. I know, because I tried it a few times (not doing that is one of the lessons I learned along the way). Writing good content, commenting and becoming a part of the conversation works a lot better.

That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to be gleaned from Brian’s report, because there is. But disagreeing with one of its express or implied themes should not incite a blogospat.

It’s About Relationships

Rather than focus on links, the better approach is to focus on relationships. The blogosphere is a small place in a lot of ways, and if you add to the conversation, people will notice you. Not might. Will. Relationships allow for traveling companions as you trek up bloggers hill as well as Adam Green‘s link clusters.

Do I want links? You bet I do. I just know that there’s a better way to get them than begging, link-baiting and hoping.

Preachers Sharing a Corner

So in a way, we’re all preaching variants of the same sermon. Good content and good relationships builds connections which lead to links which leads to traffic, which leads to more good content.

You just have to put in the time and effort to create organic growth.

And where growth is concerned, slow and steady wins the race.

Adam Green on the M-Listers

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.