Blogging and American Top 40 is it coming to this?
I was sitting on this post for the right time, and today’s New York Times article about blogger stress is the perfect trigger.
2008 is the Casey Kasem era of social media. You know, American Top 40 (old schoolers can actually hear the jingle when they read this; amazing, the mind is a wasteful place for the terrible, or something senatorial like that).
In this era, we are a bit obsessed with quantity. More blogging to stir up more traffic, more commenting to stir up more numbers. It’s a cycle that gets reflected in Technorati, Tweeterboard and all the rest. It’s giving stress to bloggers, and why not? Some face the same business objectives as any major mainstream media outlet (Agh! God, no! Mainstream?!) does without any of the support infrastructure. Being on a list is a snapshot in time that translates into power, fame and perhaps money (directly or indirectly) — not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say.
This era is driven by three factors:
1) skepticism about social media from marketers and business decision makers
2) technologies and algorithms (not to mention Al Gore rhythms) that can measure, or claim to measure, just about every nook and cranny of influence on the Web
3) 20th-century business models supported by tendencies of human nature
It becomes a daily churn of what song, blog post or tweet is rising up the charts like a bullet. This leads to discussions about “How you too can be in the Top 100 (“hundred hundred hundred…” echo added for effect). Those who are not in the top hundred or thousand — or whatever number we need to feel good about repeating to our peers — might suffer list envy. I say “we” because, even for me, it’s nice to be loved, and those lists are one way love is interpreted. However, this can create list envy. Envy causes spam. You know — size envy, mortgage rate envy, list envy. It’s all the same.
There are ways to achieve a quantitative goal of getting on the list. The problem with that is it can lead to blogging for the list and not blogging for the community. Yes, before someone jumps me, there are certain things like linking that provide both mutual growth of the community and potentially rising on the list — understood. Yeah and people need money, I have five kids so I know all about bills.
These kinds of envy set up situations in which people start to advise others about getting on “the list.” In some cases, the push for metrics and the drive to monetize has created a cottage industry of getting on the list. To me, that’s an old model exerting its muscle and temptation on the new world of social media. The temptation and the envy exist because for every A-list blogger (really, they are more like publishing companies) there are 1,000 others who want to be A-list. No one wants to hear, “…is slipping from our Top 40 list this week.”
This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under new media.
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January 8th, 2008 at 7:14 am
Wanna’ see a place where all the people who want to sell you the dream of making the “A” list? It’s called http://www.Gurudaq.com - a kind of Nasdaq of the folks who pitch the dream that you’ll be successful if you only learn to optimize your web site or blog. What’s being lost is optimizing your human abilities to relate to other business people. Where’s the human factor these days? As we wrote recently, “…it does mean that numbers is not the main game you want to play. That’s the game they’re playing on you. Don’t bite.”
January 10th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Thanks for the comment Mike, and the link to a crazy site. I try to keep my stock up with family, friends, clients, and the like. I don’t know I buy into being a traded commodity.
When I was a kid, Mr. Rogers told me I was special and you were too, so I’m not about to put a price on someone’s “blog” net value.
Readers, Michael Benidt and Sheryl Kay do a great job of uncovering hidden treasurers on the net. Ways to search things, how to use the net. They have the blog Hidden Treasurers on the Internet and their company is Golden Compass. Sheryl has helped seniors and Alzheimer’s patients learn about the web. Michael spent much of his time with Waldenbooks and as a speaker with Pryor/CareerTrack seminar company. http://www.goldencompass.com/
Thanks again, and you just helped us donate a food item to a St. Paul food shelter.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:58 am
I am late commenting on this post, but there is a reason to not aspire to be to high on any list. I think the best position on any list is near the bottom. That way you can say you are on it without the stress of trying to stay near the top.
March 30th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Top 40 what? Pop Songs? But your style is more indy folk techno metal blues (with a sprinkling of pop). Being on the top 40 gets you tons of “general traffic” and in some forms of adverising that might be all you want.
Not that I have all the answers, but I run a webpage that helps with 1 specific error message people get in Windows XP. I don’t try to solve all your problems with Windows XP, just this one problem.
If you search Google for the text of the error message, I am the top entry, throw in stuff like quotes or “fix” etc, and I’m still within the top 10 results.
My solution is given free, and there are Google Ad Words on the page, but the real money is from donations of people who are able/willing to throw me the $5 donation, and I get approximately two a week.
Granted I’m not going to retire on this, but it takes about an hour of maintenace a week and makes $500 a year. I suppose if I had 100 sites like this I could make $50,000, but that would be 100 hours a week.
But to get back to your “Top 40″ metaphor, I never mention the URL of the site or the error message, but instead encourage people to “search google for the error message you get”. And there they find me at the top of the indy folk techno metal blues (with a sprinkling of pop) list.