Blogosphere Elitism
C-SPAN has a great discussion panel running on TV called Political Blogs & 2008 Elections. The panel discussion is sponsored by the Robert Dole Institute of Politics. The speakers for the panel are Erick Erickson, Jerome Armstrong, Scott Johnson, Joan McCarter, and Patrick Hynes.
A lot of the discussion is very general and hardly scratches the surface, but there is certainly a level of wisdom between the group and it shows in the panel dialog. However, I notice that none of the bloggers present the problem with elitism within the blogosphere.
Many, MANY bloggers have talked about the “long tail” of the blogosphere. If you aren’t familiar with the long tail, it’s basically a way of explaining the majority of today’s blogs.
The top blogs make up the head, which represents the largest section of traffic, and the rest of us make up the long tail, which represents the blogs with less traffic and influence. Normally I would give you examples, images and links for such an explanation, but I’m currently on a flight to Washington DC so I have no internet access. I’ll try and add some links in within the next few days. UPDATE: Check out this link for more info on the “long tail”.
Anyways, the elitism is, in my opinion, a fairly new phenomenon within the Conservative blogosphere. While I’ve been running websites for six years now, I’ve only been blogging for about three. But in this three year period I’ve watched the atmosphere shift in ways that I used to hope would never exist.
Back when I first started blogging it was a free for all. The traffic and influence floating around was fair game for ANYONE who could write a half decent post and had something interesting to say. Unfortunately, those days are long over and the benefit is now only enjoyed by a handful of bloggers who hold the keys to the power of the blogosphere. This top level of bloggers is known as the “A-List”. It’s a word that I for one am already sick of hearing. It’s not envy because ConservaBlogs is pretty close to becoming an A-List blog considering the fact that we’re only eight weeks old and we’re ranked top 12,000 with Technorati. Our traffic is increasing by at least 7% every week and we’re adding more bloggers every day. So yes, we’re well on our way to this magical A-list. My frustration with many of these A-listers is the fact that they seem to forget the long tail, or the little guy, once they become “big”.
One thing I NEVER want to forget is that if and when we do make the A-list it will only be because the rest of the blogosphere helped us get there. Sure, some of the big dogs break great stories… Dan Rather ring a bell? But do you think those stories would have hit it so big if the rest of us weren’t talking about it?
I see the success of the blogosphere as a team effort. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Not “I’ll scratch yours until you can afford a machine that does it for you”. We work together to promote each others stories. Isn’t that the way it all started? Isn’t that how we all network and make things happen?
It’s a given that a percentage of blogs will turn their backs on the rest once they hit “stardom”. I know this because I’ve personally worked for several big corporate blogs who specifically instructed me NOT to link to other blogs who compete for the same traffic. To give you a good example, I’ll use a site that I’ve never worked for. I’m going to take some flack for this, but the truth is truth. Engadget, one of the webs most visited gadget/tech blogs is also one of the WORST when it comes to elitism. When you surf through their pages all you find is links to MORE of THEIR pages. Last year I did some blogging for a big mobile phone blog and I frequently ended up at Engadget because of the amount of posts that appear in a day’s time. The site was brilliant for finding new stuff, but notorious for not giving proper credit to the source the gadget or story was found at. In fact, I found it virtually impossible to get to the original source of a find that was posted on the site. If I found a post about a Motorola phone, there would be quotes from an official press release from the company, yet there was no way possible to click through to Motorola or the press release.
My point is that most, or at least a lot of A-listers hate to give away traffic once it’s been given to them. Once those dollar signs start flying around, and they will when you hit 10,000 plus visits a day, many bloggers stop caring about the community and only care about the almighty buck.
Don’t get me wrong, I love money and the $30.00 a month I make from this blog is a welcomed bonus, but when money drives the decisions of bloggers we can assume the entire blogosphere is in trouble. Just as money has ruined so many other good things of this world, it can also bring us down as a collective.
Why? Because it hurts the guys on the front line and is pushing out a lot of very talented bloggers who would have otherwise made excellent information resources. A good friend of mine quit blogging about three months ago thanks to this scenario. He wrote a column that was submitted to another site and an A-lister picked up the story but linked to the page on the other site. The A-lister even quoted the person who submitted the story to the site. The quote was from an unknown submitter who had nothing to do with the original column. Do you see what happened? The original source didn’t get mentioned, and none of the original story was quoted on the A-listers blog. The A-lister basically re-wrote the entire story and then linked to a scraper site as the source.
How bad can it get? Well, we really won’t know until it gets that bad. But it is clear that many talented bloggers are throwing in the towel and being replaced by those who only blog because it suddenly became profitable. Is this healthy for the blogosphere?
The good news is that not all the apples are bad… yet. In the political realm you have Little Green Footballs. LGF will link to ANYONE, even if the blog being linked to completely goes against its ideology. Does it hurt the blogs ranking or traffic? Well, the blog can have 80,000 plus visitors a day so you tell me.
For marketing you have blogs like SEOPedia, an A-lister who hasn’t forgotten who helped put him there. SEOPedia thrives on finding good content to link to and I think that is extremely healthy for the online community. It’s good for the reader, the blog owner, and the content provider. Everyone wins!
So in keeping with the spirit that brought us bloggers to this great place known as the world wide web, I call on all A-list bloggers to work on keeping the blogosphere the way it was, is, and the way it should be. If we don’t stay together on this, I fear we’ll have some serious problems to deal with moving forward.
What say you?
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