Buzz or substance
November 20, 2007
Replace that with traffic vs substance if you like, excellent quote from Doc Searls in this post, something to think about:
... do you go for buzz, or do you go for substance? Yes, you can go for both, but if your main purpose is popularity you sell out substance. That’s just how it goes. You may still traffic in substance, but it’s secondary. And if you go for substance you’ll sometimes get some buzz, but as a secondary effect.
The post was written on the back of this debate about the blogosphere and TechMeme, but the questions it raises applies just as much to mainstream media.
Searls' entry confuses me: What exactly is the relation between centralization/decentralization and traffic/substance?
On a simpler note: It would seem that blogs exacerbate any problem that might already exist in the mainstream media between popularity for the moment and producing quality content. One has to fight for one's audience here, and one's audience is in the content-producing business itself much of the time. The decentralization makes it difficult to disseminate very high-quality ideas - the blogs that get massive traffic consistently which do trade in ideas/strategies are about blogging usually. The ideas and strategies are usually pretty obvious - I think I've actually been ahead of the curve in blog-promotion strategies several times. It's gotten me nowhere, given how much work it is to have a chance to build an audience.
Did I show you this link? It talks about the problem of rewarding bloggers generally:
http://inrethinking.blogspot.com/2007/06/on-blogging-having-opinion-and-quality.html
Posted by: ashok | November 22, 2007 at 09:40 PM
Follow the links in Searls' post. It starts with a quote from Dave Winer, whose starting point is Fred Wilson's complaint that Techmeme is causing all the blogs he loves to focus on the same. Too many blogs and mainstream media sites focus on the same topics, possibly to game the system, become traffic/buzz leaders, which poses the question: do you go for buzz or substance? A question that just as well could be asked mainstream media: do you 'game the system' with lots of celebrity or tabloid news, litter your headlines with click-winning words like sex or porn, or do you try to be the leading news provider in your field or niche, consistently writing about the issues that matter, hopefully becoming a must-read for the opinion leaders, decision makers and people genuinely interested in your field. I could write a treatise on this, but for my own part, this blog is a labour of love written in my very limited sparetime, and traffic or buzz is just a welcome by-product, not a goal in itself.
Posted by: Kristine | November 24, 2007 at 02:29 PM