Bloggasm

In the blogosphere, there are two polar opposite categories of bloggers: those who create content and those who link to the content of others. Though most blogs fall somewhere in between these two, there are a good number of bloggers that deal almost exclusively with finding links of interest and then posting them.

In terms of popularity, the blog Boing Boing – which became a blog in 2000 — is certainly the most well-know of the link blogs. In its “suggest a link” section, it states “Boing Boing publishes links — so if there’s no link, there’s not much chance we’ll link to it.” In other words, it only deals with linking to other websites.

This leads me to assume, then, that in order for a link blog to become popular, it must find websites that have a broad-based appeal. Not only that, it must find those sites first. Just as newspapers try to scoop each other to try and gain an audience, link blogs would theoretically have to scoop other link blogs in order to develop a following.

With this theory in mind, I set out to test it on Boing Boing. For a 24-hour period, I logged every single link that was posted on Boing Boing. I then removed every link that was promoting a project of one of the blog’s editors. For instance, if Cory Doctorow was posting a link to a new article he’d written, I didn’t include it. Why? Because Doctorow would have had an unfair advantage of reaching that URL before everyone else.

For this particular 24-hour period there were 16 links if you took out all self-promotion links. I then used various blog search engines — Technorati, Google Blog Search, Blogpulse — to find every single blog that had found and posted the link before Boing Boing. I then went in and manually removed every spam blog and non-English blog from the list.

In the end, there was a grand total of 112 blogs that had scooped Boing Boing for this 24-hour period. Divided by 16, that means that an average of 7 blogs scoop Boing Boing for every post. But this is a slightly misleading figure, because of the 16 links that day, Boing Boing was the first to post 8 of them. That means that for 50% of the links that Boing Boing posts, it was the first blog to find them.

I also noticed that the later in the day the links were posted, the more likely that other blogs had managed to scoop Boing Boing. This indicates that many of the links posted on Boing Boing are to URLs that were created within a 24-hour time span.

So what does this mean? Was my theory correct?

Well, in this particular instance: Yes. Boing Boing was consistently among the first blogs in the blogosphere to discover a link of interest and then post it.

Here are the results broken down:

Number of posts: 16
Number of blogs scooped Boingboing for those posts: 112
Average number of scoops per post: 7
Number of posts that weren’t scooped by a single blog: 8, or 50%

Ok, I’m headed out for the weekend, but not before I point you to this wonderful feature article about the history of Gawker.

via ed

I don’t have much time to talk about my endorsements for the 2007 Weblog Awards (which end today), but I thought I’d quickly list them and encourage others to vote. If you comb through our archives, you’ll actually find interviews that I conducted with several of the nominees:

Best Blog: I endorse BoingBoing

Best individual blogger: I endorse majikthise

Funniest Blog: I endorse Jon Swift

Best online community: I endorse Fark

Best liberal blog: I endorse Glenn Greenwald

Best technology blog: I endorse readwriteweb

Best science blog: I endorse Pharyngula

Best video blog: I endorse Crooks and liars

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Related posts:
1. Blog Highlights: Sadly, No!
2. Interview with LiewCF

I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a grammar snob, but I’m overwhelmed with how many bloggers who make a full-time living off of blogging don’t understand simple grammatical rules. I know that I have my share of typos and grammar errors, but I’m talking about the kind of things that are repeated so much that I’m not quite sure that the blogger even knows the grammatical rule in question.

As recent surveys show, most blog readers are well-educated, and every time you do something like this, it catches on a person’s eyes, causing him or her to stop reading for a brief moment and interrupting the reading flow. I think it’s reasonable to ask a blogger who makes a full-time living off his blog to take a day to read William Strunk’s Elements of Style. I’m not asking for that blogger to catch every typo, every misplaced modifier. I’m not asking that you don’t end on a preposition (these are minor offenses), but for god’s sake, whenever you want to use ownership with the word “it,” it’s “its,” not “it’s.” (as you’ll notice, I placed all punctuation within the quotes, another thing that bloggers neglect to do) In this post, Darren makes the same mistake twice in one paragraph:

Every niche has it’s jargon and buzzwords but I’m constantly reminded (by emails from readers asking me to explain what I mean when I use them) that quite often the people who read blogs and the people who write them live in different worlds. Lots of people accuse the Web 2.0 niche of this but I’d argue that every niche has it’s buzzwords that you should think twice about using.

Both times, the mistake caused a bump in my reading. C’mon, I’m not asking you guys to hire full-time copyeditors, but at least take the time to learn the basic rules. I’m talking to you too.

Related posts: Blog Highlights: Sadly, No!

The Emerging Writers Network is run by Dan Wickett, a 40 year old with a B.S. in Statistics and a healthy appetite for contemporary literary fiction. Dan has been reviewing books for the EWN and its members since 2000 and has been conducting author interviews, and e-panels, since 2002. He happily accepted an invitation to the Litblog Co-op in the past year. Dan has three children, all of whom, perhaps not so surprisingly, all like to read!

Simon Owens: Since your blog focuses a lot on new writers, do you get many emails from writers who self-publish their work through vanity presses? What are your views on self-published books?

Dan Wickett: I do, and I must admit to a bias against them. I believe that while the publishing system certainly has flaws, that the route of manuscripts being submitted, read, read again, negotiated over, edited, revised, copy edited, proof read, etc. leads to a better product than most self-published books.

That said, I have peeked at a few self-published books - the best chance of my doing so to date has been somebody self-publishing a story collection where I can see that four or five of the pieces were previously published in literary journals that I enjoy and admire.

Simon Owens: With author interviews you conduct, which do you find more interesting: Questions about the writer’s life, or his/her body of work?

Dan Wickett: I certainly enjoy both types of questions, but I do enjoy finding something specific about an author’s life that I can question them on that might surprise them a bit - be it a question about somewhere they’ve lived, or about a past professor, or classmate, etc.

Also, many authors don’t seem to want to discuss their own writing in great detail. Those that are interesting in discussing the craft of writing, and their own work in particular though? Those authors are great to ask questions about their work to.

Simon Owens: What are some of the promotional methods that you use to promote new writers?

Dan Wickett: I have a growing email list of EWN members (just under 1300) that I send out reviews and interviews to. These also get posted to both the Emerging Writers Network site and the EWN Blog The emails also occasionally have notes and plugs about recent successes some authors have had.

Every so often, I also do some individual story or poem, work of the day, posts at the blog. When I do, these are typically of newer writers, or from literary journals.

And during the time period between Thanksgiving and Christmas each year, the EWN has two promotional ‘gifts’ for members: A) A Holiday Book Offer - in which a signed copy of a book is made available to all members for less than cover cost of the book itself. These have typically been debut books by the author over the years and have always been from small presses; and B) A Holiday Gift Email, in which I solicit stories, poems and novel excerpts from 4-15 authors in the network and send it out in an email the first week or so of December. Again, many of the authors selected are still early in their career.

Simon Owens: How has your experience been with the Lit-Blog Co-op? Is the group essentially an extension of your own goal to promote unknown works?

Dan Wickett: My first post once I became a member of the LBC says it all - it took me about 4 whole seconds to respond yes when asked to join. I think that all of the members involved bring something special and different to the nominating process, and the discussion process, and I was a little more than thrilled when asked to join.

And, yes, I really like the fact that the group is trying to promote “authors and presses that are struggling in a crowded marketplace.”

Simon Owens: What upcoming book publications are you looking forward to the most?

Dan Wickett: It’s not due out for another week or so, but I can’t wait for the publication of Daniel Woodrell’s new one, Winter’s Bone, so I can officially review it and not just froth at the mouth about it in general terms. Another due out this month is Liesel Litzenburger’s The Widower.

September brings Tom Franklin’s Smonk, and October brings Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, and William Gay’s Twilight!

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Dan Wickett: Great timing as I just did a post on my ten favorite litblogs. I would wholeheartedly endorse daily visits to Ed Champion’s Return of the Reluctant, Jeff Bryant’s Syntax of Things, Michael Orthofer’s The Literary Saloon, Laila Lalami’s Moorishgirl and Carolyn Kellogg’s Pinky’s Paperhaus.

Next to Crooks and Liars, my favorite liberal blog is Sadly, No!. It has almost no practical use whatsoever, and perhaps that’s why I like it so much. Instead of attacking the most influential conservative pundits, this blogger manages to find the most outlandish wingnuts out there and tear them to pieces. What makes the blog interesting isn’t the way he takes them down — that’s just too easy to do — but his unique talent for actually finding these whackjobs.

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