Link to Someone New

By Shamus Posted Sunday Oct 1, 2006

Filed under: Links 5 comments

Ernesto Burden is another person who has dicovered the fun of using Comic Book Creator.

Seth Godin has a bunch of statistics over at his blog. Fun stuff like:

  • 31.4% of Americans don’t have internet access.

(I assume this means ‘don’t have internet access in their homes’)

And…

  • 90% of the people in France have not created a blog.

Which is a pretty good set-up for a joke. The exercise is left to the reader. The rest of the statistics are interesting as well.

Here is the thing about this guy’s blog, which ties in with what he was saying with all of these statistics: I’ve never heard of Seth Godin. I spend every single day bouncing around blogtopia and I’ve never stumbled across his site. He’s in the Technorati top 100, and almost 6,000 people (!) have linked to him. At #39, he’s in the top 0.002% of all blogs*. He has a bunch of books. Yet I’ve never heard the name, seen the face, read the blog, or saw one of those books.

This reminds me of the post I had a while back on finding good blogs within the long tail. I keep trying to think of blogs in familiar terms – like books or movies or TV. If a book is in the top 0.002% of all books, then we’re talking about some universally recognized books: Treasure Island. The Bible. Catch-22. Not everyone has read them, but good luck trying to find someone who never heard of them. In the same way, the top 0.002% of all movies would be stuff like Gone With The Wind and Citizen Kane. Everyone in the English-speaking world has heard of those. But a blog that is in the top 0.002% can still be virtually unknown, even among avid blog readers. The world of blogs is so diffuse it defies old ways of thinking about fame and recognition.

* This is assuming there are 1.5 million blogs out there, a number which is just a guess. When my site was new and unlinked, it was ranked 1.5 millionth, and I’m assuming new blogs start at the bottom. This is also assuming Technorati rankings have meaning. Note that lots of blog-style sites that do not use proper blogging software are omitted. For example, I don’t think Chizumatic appears on Technorati. So, all of this might be useless and a waste of your time.

 


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5 thoughts on “Link to Someone New

  1. BeckoningChasm says:

    There’s only one way to come across any random blog, and that’s to shoot around the internet either with direction or blindly.

    Books and movies, on the other hand, have a variety of ways to be discovered. Take movies for example–you can see them in the theatre, Blockbuster, on the shelf at someone’s house, mentioned by other movies, mentioned by critics, mentioned in books, etc. Or you can see information about them on the internet. (It also helps they’ve been around a lot longer.)

    Someday a new way to discover blogs will come about, but I have no idea what that might be. Direct brain-broadcasting maybe.

  2. Cineris says:

    A new way to discover blogs … Word of mouth, perhaps? I know I recommend a lot of blogs to different people — Not that they listen, of course. They probably think I’m crazy. What’s a blog?

  3. Pixy Misa says:

    This is assuming there are 1.5 million blogs out there, a number which is just a guess.

    Technorati states that it is currently tracking 55.7 million blogs.

  4. Shamus says:

    55 million? I wonder why it started me at 1.5m when I had zero links? Do the bottom 54.2 million have negative scores?

    Hmmmm…

  5. My computer did not load the anti-spam image. Luckly, I know what it is. That is a result of my connection, while I am in Iraq, and no reflection on some error of your page, software, or blog.

    I do not search for blogs. I quest for many things. But for blogs, I wait for others to blaze the trails. If I searched for the, I would find my self short on time.

    I KNOW there are many good things out there. If I went for all of them, I wouldn’t have time for most of them. So I let fate, destiny, and friendship choose for me. “Hey! Check this out!” Which is how I found you. Yay you!

    M.

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