Subscribing to people or to search feeds?

February 11, 2005

I’ve been blogging off and on for 2 years, but it took me until recently to really understand how big this thing is going to be. In my experience you mentally have to jump through an number of hoops before you can comprehend why blogs, or more accurately the blogoshpere is going to be vital both to individuals and business.

Now that I’ve been turned into an evangelist – takes me back 10 years to when no one in the UK had heard of the Internet – the interesting question is: How can I illustrate the value proposition?

My theory is to RSS enable the person/company which involves pre-populating some feeds, or otherwise they will never open the reader. But as this post points out, Tag/search feeds can become even more important.

This is new to me, but I can see it makes complete sense. I find that although reading peoples feeds is facinating I find that I get pulled off on too many tangents which makes me anxious about the job in hand.

In my own personal blog reading evolution I’m obviously not yet using Technorati feeds enough. I only have 2 feeds set up. So I know what I gotta do then!

NapsterizationThere are Feeds and Then There are Feeds


Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

January 31, 2005

This is a great article that clearly explains why the power or zipf distribution means that the blogoshphere can (already) be divided into three.

  1. Firstly the small number of stars These are the ones that are always talk about business models and telling us how they have an authentic voice – but these are the ones that are becoming mainstream media.
  2. Secondly there are a moderate number of bloggers with a moderate number of readers. These are the stars of small niches. Eg Vertical niches.
  3. Lastly there are the masses that no one is really interested in. Although they might get their 15 mins of fame, their blog is simply a conversation with their friends. These are the guys using MSN spaces!

Weblogs, and Inequality


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