Ultimately, though, it is all about the links. Links are the currency of the Web. They are the way attributions are made. In most cases, media companies would be better off if they could just get everyone who is copying their stuff to link back to them than by trying to extract licensing fees out of them or suing them. There is a lot less friction in asking for a link, and it doesn’t cost anything to give one out. Yet all of those links can turn into traffic, both directly and by imbuing the original source with higher search karma (i.e. a higher ranking on search engines).
100% exact.
Two things:
- The blogging revolution let everyone be his/her own editor. Great.
- The blogging revolution let everyone believes that he/she can be his/her own publisher. Wrong. Most people don’t have any internet marketing skills. And as the TechCrunch blog post explains above, you need links from the big bloggers to have Google Search computing your blog (and thus to receive visitors by the thousands, afterwards). Now what the TechCrunch blog post does not say… is… how the hell you manage to engineer these valuable incoming links. Simple. You do that by performing free, unsolicited services to these big bloggers, and they thank you by linking to your little blog. After months and years, and dozens of good links from big blogs, Google assigns you a somewhat acceptable PageRank (5 or 6/10), and, in the end, 50,000+ visitors from Google Search ends up on your blog —providing that you have something to say, of course.
I would argue that feed subscription, and social bookmarking, have also become important currency in their own right. For instance, I originally read this post from the comfort of my Google Reader account.
Hummm… RSS is a technology of convenience for web consumption. But it’s not a currency. Links is a currency in that you pay a service with a link back to the person who provided that service.
Yeah. You know, not too long ago, a bunch of people decided that the link was going the way of the hit in terms of its ability to be relied upon as a measurement of attention.
Thing is, a link, unlike a hit or a feed subscription, is a gift that keeps on giving. After all, it’s not just a sign that attention has been paid, it actually potentially diverts more attention in a particular direction…so I haven’t really bought the whole “link is dead” shpiel. Still, there’s something to it–there are certainly a lot more tools out there than there once was.
Del.icio.us stands in the middle of the two phenomenon, I think, because tagging a website there also saves its location on the main website.
Exactly. Thanks for your insight. Good luck for your blog, by the way.
Thanks. I think I mentioned the long-tail blogging phenomenon last time I commented, right? Well, three years of posting has allowed me to reap the benefits of that–some 60+% of my traffic comes from search engine queries. Since I’m not doing this for a living, I’m content to blog for writing’s sake and enjoy a steady increase in traffic this way over a long period of time.