Unabashed

Disclaimer: I do not hate uberblogs. I like, and subscribe, to every blog listed in this post. I am only trying to make a point. 

BoingBoing is the Wal-Mart of blogs. It’s overwhelming how much they put out there, and it’s interesting how much of it is borrowed content. Not that there’s nothing wrong with that; Wal-Mart made its way to the top basically by overwhelming the marketplace with cheaper versions of what people were buying, and putting it out there in staggering quantities. But as a kid I remember thinking that I would never buy a shirt (for example) at Wal-Mart because I knew that a hundred other kids at school would have that same shirt. The same in a way goes for BoingBoing: if you blog their content, you’re blogging something that a thousand other bloggers have already seen, and you’re not going to get much response. Don’t get me wrong: BoingBoing is great, just like Wal-Mart is great: they provide a product the public desires. Look at it this way: If Wal-Mart accepts a product and stocks it in their stores, the company who manufactured the item will sell like there’s no tomorrow. And if BoingBoing takes a small-scale blogger’s post and puts it on their website, said blogger is going to reap huge rewards in page rankings as well as expanded audience.

Digg is the same kind of thing, but Digg is more like Target… 

The problem is that it can be overwhelming. The blogs that have a lot of people working at them (think Engadget and BoingBoing) post so much content that it’s difficult to watch it, and sometimes this can push users away rather than attract them. Even some blogs who have only one author put out massive amounts of posts, from three to five to sometimes even ten a day, and this, too, can be overwhelming. For me, I like a single-authored site who writes one to three posts per day of original content. Yes, I still check out BoingBoing from time to time, but not every day. For my daily feeds I check out Charlie Stross’s diary and a host of other single-author blogs (see my blogroll in the side column. Yes! I do read the blogs in my sidebar, it’s not just link trading) who post original, meaningful, interesting content. 

written by Matt Mitchell