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One other thing I noticed is that as blogging turned into a business fewer and fewer links were coming my way from other blogs. Still working it out what it all means, but for me it means going back to the basics and participating, finding interesting stories that other bloggers are ignoring, and getting stuff no one else is (interviews with Congressmen/women, for instance).
The sad part is that at this rate with the changes going on, blogging will be dead within a year - especially tech blogging. People aren't realizing yet that cannibalism is going on. Save my comment and look back in a year and see if I am right :)
Yes, in many cases, a reference can be made to another blog around a big topic that gets the majority of the visitors. (Example: Someone writes about TweetDeck and says I got the story first. TweetDeck should get 90% of the visitors) That absolutely makes sense.
people need to remember the elevator analogy more often.
Also, there is the issue of Google. I'm not sure what Google will be doing with the distribution of comments and content into Twitter, FriendFeed and other aggregators. There will be a slow evolution but in the meantime, Google's algo will probably still reward high quality blogs with lots of high quality links and high quality content.
If Allen amends his comment to be: "Blogging is Dead! Long Live Blogging!" then I will agree. But this new form of blogging will be have to be much higher quality as certain types of blogging behavior migrate into Disqus, FriendFeed, Twitter, GoogleReader, etc.
1. a few of the big blogs refuse to link outside their network
2. techies are using tools like twitter and ff to share things - not the typical blog links like they were using in the past
3. more and more tech people are reading content in a reader which basically isn't monetizable. then when they see a story they like, they google share it or pimp it on ff or twitter - again no link
what it means is that we all have to work even harder for the links we have
Danny makes an excellent point regarding Google - for a handful of blogs, they already have their google credits and so no future linking to those blogs will matter at all. For those of us who need links, the discussion is quite different.
But I see what you are saying about the oxygen being sucked out of the ecosystem by the big blogs and aggregators and the increasing difficulty of monetization.
All I ask is: for people like louisgray and centernetworks and scoblelizer, give out links generously to smaller bloggers because it is the fuel that will power their discoverability through Google.
I don't have anything intelligent to say about the monetization issue other than to say thanks for explaining!
I have only recently seen the likes of these types of links so I don't know how things used to be, but I was quite surprised to not see the "effect" that I've heard so many sysadmins cringe at. It also makes me wonder if the "TechCrunch" effect is a myth. This is one more reason these sites like FriendFeed and Twitter are so important - I think they are the future way of driving traffic and most importantly, community (aka the recurring visitors), to your blog.
Transforming information into useable knowledge. Now that is the key!
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/10/tech-blog...
You can spike with Digg and the rest and have a one-time bump, but they don't necessarily leave with new RSS feed subscriptions.
I remember the first time we got a link from Mashable and I was on the verge of pure grief over a dozen of visitors from there (it proves that a comment on their post gives almost the same in terms of traffic so leave a couple of comments and stop bothering about links from them or them refusing to attribute the sources). What such links from the top blogs definitely do provide (in tons) is attention from sploggers: their content gets scrapped along with your link and you get a few trackbacks (which I guess is good for Google PR since they are links anyway).
All the other factors are absolutely true: social media and bookmarking services rule the show here and once you get on Hacker News, you can stop worrying about incoming links from bloggers.
The only thing that I still hope for is that this realization won't kill conversation among bloggers which is very possible since so many people still believe that if they link out a lot they will get a lot of incoming links as well and traffic with them.
P.S. Louis, the link to Profy here has brought us 3 visitors already, just FYI :)
Don't sit on your hands thinking this article will drive hundreds to Profy. It was but one link in a few dozen. :-)
And I still have doubts about how smart Google is in determining splogs and not taking them into account to calculate pagerank. At least Technorati still shows all the splogs and the authority is often pretty much increased when a link to your blog is scraped from a TechCrunch post.
And so instead of sitting on my hands I think I'd better thank you for adding Profy to your list of the most prominent tech blogs - I don't know how it escaped my mind in the first comment :)
Getting linked boosts Google traffic. Google traffic is more than double FriendFeed traffic and still your #1 source of traffic. Looks to me that linking is still extremely important.
What's really going on is that FriendFeed is now another channel for incoming links (like Charlie says above).
The stats I'd *really* like to see are the incoming referrals from Google.com over time. Were they higher prior to FriendFeed's launch? After FriendFeed became popular have the Google referrals decreased? If so, then you could say linking is "less important." If not, then you could say FriendFeed is a big source of traffic. But just because FriendFeed traffic has increased, that doesn't mean Google traffic has decreased (has it?)
we used to look at the web and share it ... now we look at ourselves, the web is the background
It would be interesting to find out if you were actually receiving less links, meaning that fewer bloggers are linking out . . .
1. Over-supply, especially in tech space, exasperated by commercial interests.
2. Attention and time constrained readers.
3. A valley in really interesting topics that readers seek multiple perspectives on.
That said links from other blogs are obviously very important because they can boost search rankings and because if other bloggers notice you they are more likely to link to you, etc.
But a question: how can the blog phenomena been developed so it links getting more power, gives more traffic and a higher value? I think there's possible for a lot of good improvements if we just have the ideas!
For instance, I think music blogs have always had poor in-post blog linking (but great mp3 file linking and extensive blogrolls). Gabe Rivera once showed me an unreleased Techmeme for music blogs. He said that it didn't track music memes very well for a variety of reasons but mostly linking. And, that's why we've never seen it in the Techmeme stable with Memeorandum, WeSmirch, Ballbug, etc.
And, as a content producer, I like the fact that socnets are depleting the blogging pool by reducing the number of sites of people who were just looking for conversations. The hordes of eager commenters on all the new outlets need content to chew on, which means those of us who continue to write will see our value increase.
A trend I see is person to person. How do corporations tweet or create Facebook profiles? These tools are for individuals. That means corporations will need to empower and unleash the voices of their employees if they want to play in this space.
Maria Reyes-McDavis
But aside from traffic, linking, sources being social sites, or whatever, what I'm beginning to suspect is that interest groups -- some people call them "communities" -- have absolute sizes and intensity levels that drive their interaction frequency, and this interaction can occur through an increasing variety of means, not just via linking, phone calls, IMs, tweets, or whatever.
I'm sure network analysts have a more technical term for this phenomenon, which is that, for any given type of social event, the participants will choose a method of interaction that is available, easy to use, and appropriate to the participants and rge occasion. Linking is a behavior that takes effort. Why engage in it when you can just jump into FriendFeed or Twitter and connect?
One thing to watch out for, though, is to assume geeks and non-geeks behave similarly. Another issue is that, by focusing too much on interacting with like-minded groups, our ideas and thoughts won't "leak out" to others who might also be interested in benefiting.
Having myself a very small (and new blog) I start understanding the importance of interaction over linking. But where does the difference between both lies, or rather, how to merge both and make them become one? That is the real question.
The one who manages to define it, might actually come with the next big application...
(and I'm not talking about wiki technology)
However, I find that links to new sites still intrigue me enough to click on them, even in my RSS reader. That's why I have so many bloody RSS feeds: people link to new blogs that I've never heard of before and I immediately add them to my subscriptions list for later reading.
http://windows7infoblog.blogspot.com/