long_tail Archives - Successful Blog

David Sifry posted The State of the Blogosphere–Part 2 at the Technorati Weblog today. Part 2 focuses on how information is handled both in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere.

Once again Sifry provides information and analysis that will serve you in your online business and in your personal life. Everyone who wants an understanding of the state of the national media should read this. Businesses should be keeping an eye on the data Mr. Sifry has to offer, particularly businesses that spend advertising dollars. Bloggers should pay attention because opportunities are replete. But bloggers be prepared. It will require creative bloggers that can recraft this information into persuasive messages to help businesses understand that the world is becoming an economy of knowledge and that the base of that knowledge is moving as we speak.

MSM, the Long Tail, and the Top 100

David Sifry discusses the Mainstream Media stalwarts in relation to the Long Tail Blogs telling the story with his usual graphic detail. He also speaks to the Top 100, and the network effect that seems to hold the same blogs in those 100 positions. He points out, that despite the network effect, new blogs have moved in and out.

The Magic Middle

Sifry also spends time defining a group he calls the Magic Middle–bloggers who are in niche publishing with 20-100 other sites linking to them–as sometimes radically changing the economics of trade publishing with their interesting, topical, and influential blogs. These are the blogs that people like you and I read and write. We might well know them better than Mr. Sifry does.

Technorati Explore

The first new feature David Sifry describes is Technorati Explore. I have to say, I’m not clear on how it works. I’ll let him explain it.

The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the “A-list”. We call this new section Explore, and we’ve seeded it with some of the most interesting topics that we could find. But one of the nice things about Explore is that there are no gatekeepers, and that anyone who writes interesting topical blog posts can get included simply by tagging his blog and tagging his posts.

Sounds great doesn’t it? The post says much more about it. I tried it out tonight . . . I’m still not sure how it works.

What’s Authority?

The second new feature Sifry introduced is Authority Filtering. A new green slide allows you to tune your searches to adjust your results to only those with a lot of authority. Authority is calculated on number of links.

Why You Should Read This Post?

I hardly told you half of what’s in it. Here’s just a few notes–a taste–from the summary.

Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger’s and reader’s minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the “big head” of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.

Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.

The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.

I sit in the Magic Middle. Tagged with Authority–if the sliding scale works the way it’s supposed to. The MSMedia is losing ground and hardly has a clue. The blogosphere is growing faster than most folks can contemplate how to make something of it. The information is here. The future is around the corner.

What will you do?

–ME “Liz” Strauss