There's all this fixation on getting links, getting traffic, getting on the lists. Why? That's about monetization, that's about fame/celebritism, that's about gaming a structure that uses heuristics to measure what is supposedly value. And distantly, it's about having your voice heard — I get that. But it gets blown way out of proportion. We forget that getting on the Technorati 100, in the end, is supposed to be about getting your voice heard by the people you want to hear it — instead it just becomes yet another pissing contest.

But that's an old model — it's a vestige of the economics of scarcity, the analog world. The fact is, not everything I write needs to have a mass appeal. That's precisely the beauty of the long tail.

I was just having this discussion with Jay Dedman about podcasting, which is going through the same thing — everybody’s wanting to know how big podcasting will be and now there’s big money flowing into it and blah blah blah. And the content we see reflects that drive for mass appeal — even the tech shows are still very radio-like, and some less slickly produced than others but seriously, can we bust out of these old formats already? Jay said “imagine if people just interviewed their grandmas… record the history that doesn’t get recorded. The woman who had 10 kids…” And that’s exactly it. If I interview my grandma and post it on my website — what is the audience for that? Very small. My family, maybe a few of my friends — and later down the road Google may bring along some oral historians who find it interesting, and then much farther down the road, my descendants will find it invaluable. But the point is — that content doesn’t have a mass appeal, nor does it need to. It can find the people who need to hear it, and that’s just fine.

That’s just it… why the hell are we still imagining we need to drive large amounts of general traffic to our sites via getting some mass exposure on Technorati, Icerocket blah blah blah? Isn’t that the whole point of Web 2.0 — we don’t need mass explosure anymore. The whole reason we needed mass exposure before was mainstream media had no easy way of identifying exactly who their audience was. They couldn’t just send a bunch of people out into the streets and ask them if they wanted to buy their magazine, their newspaper, etc. — not cost effective. But here in the blogosphere, we really can do that. If we’re writing on a particular topic, we can go out into the street (the internet highway, as it were) and literally find who else might be interested in what we’re doing. Finding that one person or those few people takes time — but it’s a hell of a lot more effective in the long run than pursuing some generic mass traffic influx generated by getting on someone’s general list.

It’s no longer that we need everyone to come to our site in order to retain the small subset of those folks who are actually interested in what we have to say. We can cut out the middle process, and go and find the folks directly. There still may be a moment of awkward introduction, but that’s more effective even than leaving a trackback or a comment. If you really overlap with someone or respect their opinion on something, and you’ve said something you think they’d find relevant — find a way to contact them and contact them directly. We have to remember — we’re not tiny flies buzzing around the ears of elephants anymore, with no hope of getting “the media” to pay attention to us. We are, literally, the media. We are people. Blogs are people (well, some blogs are companies, too). If you want someone to pay attention to you, if you want to make a new connection, just ask. This doesn’t settle the debate, and it doesn’t mean I’m not excited about Mary’s work on new algorithms — I am. If nothing else, the discussion surrounding that is invaluable. I’m just saying — we’re not powerless. We don’t need to form new companies just so we can make new lists, in order to take action. We need to make new connections, and foster the connections that are honest, authentic and strong, as opposed to merely proliferating a bunch of opportunistic weak links.

also tagged: BlogHer