Following up on a conversation with [tag]Hugh Macleod[/tag] over on gapingvoid.
To me, equality in the blogosphere is not about every blogger being the same in quantity or measure of what they write. And it is not about status, whether measured by outcome, traffic, readership, quality or even those (I think fictitious) “attractive, sexually willing blog groupies” to which Hugh alludes. To me it’s that each person who contributes something has that something heard. In short it’s about connection.
We just want to start a conversation about IDENTIFYING ‘disconnected stuff‘ in the LongTail and DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Every voice should have at least one listener. Every writer at least one reader. Every feed at least one subscriber.
I don’t see it currently in the web2.0. There’s tools available today there are mechanisms focussed on highlighting/ranking ‘popular’ or ‘topN’ posts (with lots of links). Even efforts that try to identify value in ‘Z’ list posts, tend to promote those posts to ‘A’ list status (even if for a short time) and bringing stuff out of the long tail into the short head. (for example: [tag]Robert Scoble[/tag]’s post about aussie kid from obscurity to front page of wall street journal in 48hrs). Promotion to A-list status isn’t what I’m on about.
Lots of unrealised potential value goes untapped in the long tail. Connecting these less popular posts to people who care about the content can be done using the ‘context cluster’ ideas to connect subscribers to obscure publishers.
Rather than show me the top 100 blogs with most links, show me the bottom 100 without any links. Rather than highlight the long established bloggers who’ve built up, yet need little support, show me the newest blogs who might need a bit of support and might have interesting things to say about just what I’m interested in.
All things on the blogosphere may not be of equal value – but all people are.
Dave
[tags]equality, inequality, longtail, longtailjewel[/tags]
