Joel Turnipseed: That’s really funny. In another interview I did, the one with Ted Genoways, he said something that I hope a lot of people pick up on, because I think it’s incredibly important to this discussion. What Ted said was that, after doing their big South America in the 21st Century issue—for which they got a lot of good press: authors on NPR, segments on PBS—they got a small amount of traffic from mainstream media. But then Jason [Kottke] posted a small link and they got 25,000 visits that week from kottke.org.
Cory Doctorow: I think the most important thing about that anecdote isn’t the amount of influence that kottke.org wields, although that’s an interesting component of it, but how cheap it is to become kottke.org—to maintain Kottke Enterprises, Ltd. It’s so cheap it’s the rounding error in the coffee budget of the smallest department of one of the main publishing conglomerates. That’s all it costs Jason to run his website.
Boing Boing, and I’m not just talking cash costs—but also organizational costs, the Coasian costs, of doing this are so low. Boing Boing, for the first five years, we never had a physical meeting. We had never all been in the same room until we had been in business for five years. We had 25 phone calls in the entire history of the business.
#1. Midas Oracle was linked to by both mainstream media and blogs. Indeed, blogs (like Marginal Revolution) brought us dozens of thousands of visitors, and media (like CNET or Slate) brought us hundreds, only.
#2. Yes, it is cheap to publish a blog. However, it’s very expensive to write good content —takes a lot of time.
#3. We haven’t had any physical meeting at Midas Oracle. I’ll be working on that, yes.
Previously: The World Wide Web is all about hyperlinks, and performing services to get them to point to your blog.
