Following up on my post yesterday, on lesser-known bloggers, I’ve had quite a few comments come my way, some via the blog, some via e-mail, some face-to-face. I liked Cornelius’s suggestion the most:
You could pick one day per week/month/year and review one or more new blogs that you find noteworthy and under-appreciated on that day. Get the bloggers mentioned to write similar posts and have everyone use the same technorati tag; something like “LongTailTuesdays†or a similar catchphrase.
Something about the suggestion made me feel it would have more “legs” than a chain-letter or “list of five” approach, that a tag-based ritual would somehow be more sustainable.
So what I thought we’d do is the following:
Every now and then, choose a blog that, in your opinion, doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Introduce it to your community. Keep the intro short. Tag it NewTailBlog.
How often should you do it? Up to you. No rules.
Which blogs should you pick? Up to you. No rules.
Let the tags do their work. Let the blogosphere do its work.
And see what happens.
the best way to pick a lesser known blog is to search by a topic related to what youre thinking that day,,, there are enough good blog search tools to help you find the blogs…
another good idea is to comment on lesser known blogs… comments are always aopppreciated by bloggers
JP can you get rid of the Snap pop-up, it’s annoying :)
or could you turn it off atleast for
internal links please
Bobby, Sri, it should be off by now. Just thought I’d try it out, looks like Snap didn’t work out. Thanks for the feedback.
Isn’t this what we do anyway? Or are you highlighting the fact that many bloggers are intent on personal aggrandisement rather than genuine interaction?
I think many of us do this, but when I read Scoble’s post (which brought back all the memories of the A List debate some months ago) I realised that maybe we don’t do enough.
So I thought I’d do my bit. This is not about technorati ranking, not even about linking, just about exposure. And access. And community.
No blog is an island.
The tag would work, if the bloggers do what you suggest.
But would they do it? What’s in it for them? That is, would the idea catch on with bloggers? Of course, nobody can predict these things. If it works out cool and if it doesn’t, nice try!
Brilliant idea..
The idea is benign as well as useful.
Your premise is that your blog is one worth reading , and there lies the fallacy of your argument.
I generally find great blogs by following links posted on other blogs and add them to my own blogroll, because they deserve to be read…but this is great; I might do it. Thanks for the idea =)
On the Irish Blog Awards site – http://awards.ie, I have a “New Blogs on the Block” post every Monday which links to Irish bloggers who have just started out or not very well know. It seems to work well. I’ll add NewTailBlog as a tag to it from now on.
I do not know if Sid was trying to be positively or negatively argumentative, but there is an important positive spin to what he said. The bottom line is that, even within the restricted confines that have grown up around this particular blog, I doubt that there is very much (any?) agreement over what is “worth reading.” The reason I subscribe to THE NEW YORK REVIEW is that there are just too damned many books to read, and even advice from those who know me best is often a waste of my time. So I invest a good chunk of my reading cycles in reading about WHAT I MIGHT WANT TO READ; and, because I uses THE NEW YORK REVIEW as my primary source, I tend to come away far better informed for the experience.
Now I doubt that anything like THE NEW YORK REVIEW will emerge over the current state of blog content. Let’s face it, for most of the bloggers out there, the blog is the easiest form of vanity press; so it would be a waste of everyone’s time to write about this sort of thing the way THE NEW YORK REVIEW writes about Niall Ferguson’s latest book. As to what I write in my own blog, I certainly recognize the vanity factor; but what counts more for me is the “rehearsal” factor. Since I still put a lot of work into writing for peer-reviewed publications, I like having a nice hypertext environment in which I can work out half-baked thoughts while linking them to their relevant sources. This becomes a useful resource when I then set myself to my REAL writing. (I used to write into Usenet newsgroups the same way.) It also affords me the discipline of writing SOMETHING every day (on the average), even if it is a commonplace-book entry of a quotation that really appeal to me.
send us your number cigar eater
speed it up