I’ve been tracking the comments on a post Steve Reubel made today entitled “The Underground Blogosphere“. In it, Reubel describes the daily avalanche of email “pitches” he receives from bloggers sending him links. On cue, a number of bloggers complained, assuming Reubel addressed them directly. In fact, Reubel’s post isn’t an attack or sinister in any way – he is simply publicly coping with his status in the blogosphere. I think we may be able to learn a few things from Steve’s post about identity and the nature of the blogosphere.
First, a little background. Reubel’s blog is currently ranked 59 in the Technorati index. To put this in perspective, David Sifry’s last estimate of Technorati’s index size is 37.3 million blogs. Indeed, Reubel and his blog are in very rare air – he literally sits atop Mount Everest in the blogosphere. In achieving this very respectable and noteworthy goal, Reubel has also achieved an interesting place in the network of the blogosphere.
As Barabasi and Watts have shown, large networks, such as the blogosphere, tend to display hub and spoke characteristics. That is, large amounts of traffic tend to flow through central hubs, whereas lesser traffic flows through the spokes in the network. Indeed, this is just like our nation’s air transportation network – places like the Hartsfield, O’Hare, LAX and the NYC airports are the hubs; those hubs begat smaller hubs like Pittsburgh and Dallas, and so on down until we get to the regional airport near your home that doesn’t even have instrument approach. For any number of reasons, networks cluster and distribute traffic unevenly. The patterns that emerge look like a power law, though Barabasi has shown that these networks have scale-free tendencies (see Shirky for a more robust explanation).
The reason I mention these enormously complex, fancy models is to simply prove to you something you already know – that bloggers like Reubel are the “hubs” in the network of the blogosphere. As a result, traffic naturally flows to Reubel – and to all of the other “top” bloggers in the network. Right now, as an example, my referencing of Reubel’s post is reinforcing his position in the network.
So here is my first contention with his claim – that the size of the “underground blogosphere” is very large. As the blogosphere is scale-free, the types of traffic that hubs see doesn’t scale linearly (or log linearly) through the network. If Reubel receives 100 pitches in a day, it is not a safe assumption that the 1000th Technorati blog receives 98 pitches a day, and the 10,000th receives 90 (and so on, reflecting a power law based on 37MM blogs). In fact, due to Reubel’s position in the network, the amount of pitch traffic he sees may be vastly disproportionate to the rest of the blogosphere.
Many of the links in a scale-free network point to the hubs. Indeed, many of the links going from hubs point to other hubs (there are 90 JFK-LAX flights a day, and only 10 JFK-RDU flights a day, as an example). We see this in the blogosphere when A-list bloggers only link to each other, and so on – a rich-get-richer effect. While Reubel’s cohort likely includes bloggers from all parts of the blogosphere, his sample is disproportionately skewed towards A-listers who share his experience. This cohort also sees a large “underground blogosphere.” What’s more, since the traffic in the underground network is largely unidirectional (non-reciprocated and flowing from low to high-ranking blog), this network isn’t reinforced (imagine if all the planes flew from RDU to JFK, and only one returned).
However, even if Reubel’s claims are off, there’s a larger issue here – how bloggers connect. In a blogosphere of 37M blogs, we’ve only got time to evaluate an absolutely miniscule part of the blogosphere. Indeed, the long-tail of bloggers has its audience, but the problem is discovery. The blogosphere dually rewards links brokered through A-list blogs; first, they have passed the editorial screening of the blogger (Reubel in this case), and second, they open up a blog to a new audience who may share common interests. Therefore, it is natural that people would attempt to persuade Reubel of their post’s worth; they aren’t really trying to gain Reubel as a fan as much as they are attempting to get .01% of his fanbase to discover them – a traditional long-tail approach.
If emailing a blogger is ultimately about gatekeeping a small number of fans to your site, what does this tell us about blogging, or peer-production in general? My Facebook research continually makes me think about why we do anything online. Why do we invest the time to create things like blogs, social network profiles, webpages? It is clearly so we can be heard, that we can have the affirmation of audience. Why do you blog? Do you blog because you want to improve your writing, be known to the technoscenti, get a better job, promote a political cause? We all blog for reasons, and those reasons are always personal. However, there’s nothing wrong with that; the folks who tried to explain away why they emailed Reubel (in the comment thread) amused me. We want audience; we want power-brokers to give us approval. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, because that’s how the real world works.
I’ve given Reubel’s post a very even read. While I disagree with his size estimate, I do think he is onto something. A marketer can never stop being a sociologist – as such, they are keen to observing interesting phenomena. 100 emails pitching links a day? That’s an interesting phenomena, but why do we need a conversation about it?
In the thread, a number of commentors reported how they found these “notes from the underground” to be useful. I’m certainty one of these people. I get a few emails a week from people reading my blog; some are marketers pitching products, some are other bloggers going off-the-record, and others are people who just didn’t feel 100% comfortable leaving a comment (or didn’t feel like making the effort to step through all of Blogger’s 9 steps). As I don’t get a lot of these, I’m able to look through these emails and see what is what, and respond accordingly. Through this process, I’ve managed to make some very meaningful contacts. I would hate to think that Reubel would have a muzzling effect.
The fact of the matter is that Reubel sees so much traffic he isn’t able to make the distinctions between what is good and what is chaff. Indeed, that could be personally frustrating, but it comes with the territory. One doesn’t get into the top 100 without a tremendous amount of personal marketing; it only stands that others want his place. Indeed, one day they will have it. Reubel wants a conversation about the underground blogosphere; in a sense, I’m participating right now. I’d hate to see the echo-chamber emerge and start calling for the end of such practice’s (which Reubel clearly hasn’t). The blogosphere is about conversation, whether that be over blog posts, comments or emails.
Tags: blogging, information, networks
“We want audience; we want power-brokers to give us approval. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, because that’s how the real world works.”
I’d say we want audiences. I know you’re not not saying this, but – different people are out there trying to get their message to different audiences – some (e.g., those that e-mail Reubel) want a big audience, want to have success for its own sake or because they think they’re good writers and deserve it [not that this is a bad thing]; some write because they like writing for a given existing community (family, friends, co-workers, others in their industry, etc.); some of the latter become the former through organic growth; etc.
There’s already a pretty good set of case-studies for exactly this set of interactions and aspirations: the music industry, circa 1950s-1970s. Now – the barriers to entry were higher (i.e., you had to get a record contract, or at least be able to put together a competent demo), and that erected a barrier to access that WordPress and Blogspot don’t. But let’s set that aside for a second – let’s say that anyone who has a computer and free time enough to blog seriously is roughly equivalent to a band that could put together a demo and shop it around. What the hub-bloggers are equivalent to, then, are DJs of pre-corporate radio. Station managers had varying amounts of sway over their DJs (not unlike the fact that a lot of prominent bloggers do have some sort of institutional home), but the best – the BoingBoings of the DJ world – had pretty much free reign over what they played.
Now, if you had good drugs/women and an only pretty-good record, you were probably in business for a few spins in a way that (presumably) most hub-bloggers aren’t as susceptible (also, the aspirant linkees are dropping by Steve Reubel’s studio, blog in hand) – but it still had to be pretty-good to get through, and would generally stand on its own two feet after that. Or not. The DJs were putting their particular reputation on the line every time they put the needle onto vinyl, in a similar manner to how bloggers put their rep on the line when they out-link.
But of course – different bands were after different things. Many wanted to be international rock stars; many were content to get to the level where they could merely earn a living doing the thing they loved. Blogging is still a few steps behind in this regard – only by being a blogging superstar can you really earn a living at it, right now; being a mid-level blogger with a regular audience gets you…the satisfaction of a job well done and an occasional purchase off your Amazon wishlist.
So not a perfect analogy, but something to think about at any rate.
I’ll be glad to have a conversation with you sometimes/
About ID, about social network and social status.
I’m co-founder of U.[lik] @ http://www.u-lik.com
Ouch I jump the scary comment step.
By the way, I thinks it’s easier to drop a comment then to send a mail… you don’t put yourself in a waiting position … it’s just a bottle in the sea 4 someone to catch, maybe it will be one of your reader.
Good ranking = good content
High recognition = good comment
Maybe I missed that one…. I’ll have to wait to see (Damn !)
;-) a fan
jkd – you killed it with that analogy ;) there’s such an elegant hierarchy there too. Getting a blog post dugg or del.icio.us/popular’ed is like getting a spin on america’s top 40. Getting posted by reubel is like getting a play by a well-known DJ in a major market.
There are two things going on here in terms of motivation. People want to see the traffic spike, that’s the initial rush, but people also want to build their reader base. Of the 10k people who come from a digg or del.icio.us, maybe 50 of them will stay around and bookmark/subscribe. I think that’s the connection/brokering – we know our audience is out there, but how do we find that audience? Someone like Reubel can make the connections for us. And I think this is important because it says alot about why we like Reubel. He might be a great guy, but we read him because he connects us to others who share interests. This is the beauty of blog as community – the only shame is it take Reubel-like numbers for the community to emerge at scale.
I think this ties in well to Technorati’s recent relaunch. They want to make blogs easier to find, and you can clearly see the business logic. The blogosphere thrives off of the long tail, but finding your niche network is difficult. Technorati wants to solve this, but it does break the brokering model.
A telling statistic could look something like this – for all blogs in your newsreader, how many non-friend blogs are you subscribed to that aren’t in the technorati top 1000 (news sources aside). I wonder what this ratio would be. I should compute it for myself. It just really lets you see how difficult it is to discover the long tail of the blogosphere.
It’s Steve Rubel, not Reubel.
Just saying …
very interesting post–as someone who is newly researching and thinking about precisely these questions from an academic perspective your question “how do bloggers connect?” is very useful in its simplicity. (and also as someone with a personal “identity” blog that probably falls mainly into “mommy-blogging” category–even though exactly what “mommy-blogging” is is very much up for debate)
one issue that seems central here is the *context* (or, as you have phrased it, “situational relevance”) of the community. obviously, being linked by an “A list” blogger in your particular community will up your traffic and push you up the ladder, but I find that in the slice (node?) of mom-blogosphere that i network in the politics of connection, reciprocity, and community-affirmation are much more largely built on the practice of reciprocity of commenting first and then linkages. And of course, this makes sense in the situational context of mommy-blogging–where an unspoken rule is that you reciprocate if someone leaves a comment on your blog. In my network, I have seen quite a few conversations lately about “comment ettiquette” and how individuals will stop reading a blog if that blogger does not return the favor (break the “friendship”). At the same time I see a lot of discussion of comment-fatigue and secret admissions to “commenting on, but not really reading” a post. Reciprocal commenting strengthens and broadens the community; but at the same time, the “pressure to comment” regardless of the content of a post is felt keenly among this set (and I include myself in there).
There is a contextual, gendered aspect to this that fascinates me. I’m interested to think more about the relationship of the A-list mommy-blogosphere to the “underground” that most of us belong to.
Thanks…