In the light of yesterday’s post about the long tail of the internet and Graham Wegner’s (Open Educator) response pointing me to some related sites, I thought I’d investigate the idea that some blogs have fallen by the wayside.
The GapingVoid cartoon displaying below was a bit predictive in January 2006 wasn’t it?
The cartoonist Hugh MacLeod commented below the cartoon:
The Two Immutable Laws of Blogging:
1. “Nobody’s going to read your blog unless there’s something in it for them.” -Seth Godin.
2. “Nobody’s going to link to your blog unless there’s something in it for them.” -Hugh MacLeod
So how many blogs are in “the pile of bodies”? How many have fallen by the wayside? Impossible to know I should think. And I have this vision that as the pile of corpses grows, still littering the blogosphere, a growing army are trying blogging for the first time. And, as with any technology, it is being used in ways that were not at first envisaged.
My first impression of blogging was a bit like the soapbox in Hyde Park, or even the voice crying in the wilderness. I didn’t really have any concept of growing an audience, far less a following. This year I have learnt about the importance of taking time to read the blogs of others, think about what they are saying and to leave a comment.
So what do the best blogs look like? Here’s a list to sample.
Top 100 Australian Blogs
Top 100 Education Blogs (OEDb) - this list was created in December 2008, but my cursory investigation indicates that many are still around. Not sure whether they would make it into a top 100 these days though. Connectivism was at number 4 (seems to have moved to a new site, Stephen Downes at number 11, The Knowledge Tree (The Australian Flexible Learning Framework) at number 12, heyjude at number 44, and Graham Wegner’s Teaching Generation Z (now Open Educator) at number 76. They were just the ones that I recognised. It would be interesting to look at how many are now defunct, how many have had a makeover, and, more importantly, why.
Does anybody know of a more recent attempt to list a top 100 education blogs?
I might still be on the wrong track with my long tail investigation but it’s certainly taking me to interesting sites.
4 Comments
Love the relation to littering the blogosphere, a university in the states were working on a project of recreating the internet with the knowledge of what we know now, it would be like hiring a cleaner for the internet. Do a google search on it and have a read, its interesting stuff.
The thing is, with those two laws, ’something in it for themselves’ is left undefined.
It in fact turns out to be remarkably broad, including such things as ‘helps end the war’, ‘helps get Obama elected’, ‘helps promote social justice’ or even ‘is good to support’.
The world at large isn’t as narrowly self-interested as depicted by either Godin or MacLeod, and there is a heap of evidence that proves this.
Yes, there is churn. Yes, blogs are abandoned. Yes, people start writing on twitter or Facebook, or posting videos on YouTube, or whatever.
None of that means that any of this is a failure. None of that means that the blogosphere is a scrap heap. It shows only that what constitutes ‘normal’ in the blogosphere is a good amount of churn.
Thanks for the comment Stephen.
I think a high churn factor is probably an inevitable result of the development of new internet based applications. We all have a “suck and see” approach to new tools.
It is not unusual to decide that something we have been trialling for either a week or two or quite a bit longer either doesn’t come up to expectations or that we should look for something better. It doesn’t mean to say that the content of an abandoned blog is not still useful to those who come upon it either.
From where I stand the blogosphere is alive and well.
Even if nobody reads my blog it is still worthwhile for ME. Forcing myself to write anything down is good personal development for me, doing it in a place where someone might read it really makes me try hard to get the words in the right order.
And besides - even if 99% of ‘User Generated Content’ is not worth watching/listening/reading, 100% of it is worth DOING.
Fang - Mike Seyfang
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