Blogging hierarchies and the meta of blogging
I’ve been playing around with this newish site called Newsvine. It’s . . . hard to describe exactly what it is. It basically seems to have elements of LiveJournal, Plastic.com, and Wikipedia, all stirred into a stew of news-y goodness.
Or maybe it’s just a more cerebral Myspace.
Basically, one can submit their own articles to the site or “seed” articles they find elsewhere, which includes a link and your own comments. Unlike Plastic, there’s no submission queue; your story is immediately available. Whether or not your story treads water at the top level of story submissions or sinks faster than lead to Newsvine oblivion depends on other users reading the story and voting for it. You’re helped by Newsvine’s extensive tagging system, which makes it fairly easy to find a story on a particular topic.
Anyway, an example of one of their user-submitted original stories that struck me as interesting was this:
Newsvine - The A-list blogs rule — or do they?: “Despite being down with the flu today, I happened across the article in New York Magazine titled Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Notes of the Blogging Boom. It’s a terrific article explaining the network effects that drive the A-list, B-list, and C-list blogging phenomenon, and why, in this most democratic of journalistic media, hierarchies have developed.”
(Via Newsvine.)
Let’s face it; I have no illusions of being even a C-list blog. I’m doing it because I like to do it. It’s nice to have an excuse to browse the week’s news, and post my thoughts about them. I do it publicly because I’m an Internet citizen of the past 10+ years, and . . . honestly, it wouldn’t make sense not to.
Any audience I manage to reach as a result of this is nice (very, very nice), but ultimately incidental. I can’t really imagine pimping my blog much more than the few random comments I leave in blogs I already read regularly anyway. I’m not the world’s most social person by any means; pimping just isn’t my style.
So the A-list, B-list, C-list paradigm seems, to me, to leave out a pretty important component of the blogging world: namely the hobbyist blogger. Sure there are plenty of blogs that go for audience, but there are just as many (if not many, many, many times more) that are set up by people merely as an outlet for themselves.
Are they a part of the hierarchy? I don’t really know. Clearly, they’re a part of the blogging universe, but it’s kind of hard to rank a player who isn’t playing the game.
Technorati Tags:
recommendations, internet, Myspace.com, Wikipedia, technology, LiveJournal, Newsvine, blogging
