Salocin

Newsworthy blogging

Everyone's talking about it these days, "blogging" has become the new pet subject. It's probably the most self-absorbed art there is, since so much of the thoughts posted by bloggers seem to be about blogging itself, like a snake eating it's own tail.

I was interested in an article from the blogosphere mentioning the critical mass of blog entries it takes before a newsitem takes on a life of its own in blogspace (or whatever they're calling it today)

I'm also tickled by Downhill, a system that works out degrees of separation between weblogs using the blogging ecosystem. Now if blogosphere.us could stop pinging my front page 12 times a day and expiring all my adverts, that would be a step forward.

The Blogosphere.us article that I'm referring to asks how many sites have to link to something before is causes a cascade effect that runs through the blogging ecosystem.

Now of course as a web author, you're always hoping something like this happens to you (unless you get slashdotted, at which point you probably get angry phone calls from your web provider). But the only way to do be the genesis of a story which ripples through the weblog community is to be a true web author, rather than someone who accumulates news from elsewhere and comments on it.

While your comments may be insightful and interesting, people are going to find the news itself more interesting than the fact that you commented on it, and the links all go to news.bbc.co.uk (in my case), or some other news or newspaper site. This is a good thing, insofar as it encourages people to write content that actually might be interesting to others to read, rather than just those articles that the author thought were interesting today.

Scripting news is a good example of a blog that draws interest for it's content. While most of it is just links to things the author found interesting, every so often he sounds off (usually on the issue of standards) and gets so many people's backs up that they feel compelled to retaliate in kind, providing his site with the very links that make it so popular. I suppose the old adage is true that all publicity is good publicity, with the proviso that you have to have reached a certain threshold of notoriety before it works.

My second link is to the Degrees of Separation Engine, unfortunately named "Downhill". I was surprised that despite the dearth of incoming links to this site, it's possible to find links to salocin.com from pretty much any site in the database. To find me you just have to click on 6 links, 3 of which are stuck in the middle of a blogroll that could stretch from here to the moon if it weren't in 5pt type.

It's a neat (if not novel) use of the blogging ecosystem and a fun way to discover that you're not completely anonymous after all.