Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Blogs to Riches - The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom
Posted by Janak Parekh in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 09:45 PM
"By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that...In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work."
It's a slow news week for Pocket PCs and PDAs in general, so I went digging through my list of recent off-topic articles. This article published last month in New York Magazine is an interesting take on the haves and have-nots amongst blogs, and what makes the difference. For every Engadget out there, there's 100 sites that try to blog about gadgets but get no traffic. I know what attracted me to Pocket PC Thoughts in the first place -- it was a niche I cared about, and a bunch of Editors that cared to post interesting topics and content on the subject. And almost 13,000 posts later, I'm now a veteran editor myself. 8O
Anyway, have any of you tried to start a large-scale blog? And what draws you to Pocket PC Thoughts or other favorite sites of yours?
It's a slow news week for Pocket PCs and PDAs in general, so I went digging through my list of recent off-topic articles. This article published last month in New York Magazine is an interesting take on the haves and have-nots amongst blogs, and what makes the difference. For every Engadget out there, there's 100 sites that try to blog about gadgets but get no traffic. I know what attracted me to Pocket PC Thoughts in the first place -- it was a niche I cared about, and a bunch of Editors that cared to post interesting topics and content on the subject. And almost 13,000 posts later, I'm now a veteran editor myself. 8O
Anyway, have any of you tried to start a large-scale blog? And what draws you to Pocket PC Thoughts or other favorite sites of yours?
