Praying for a fairer blogosphere in 2008

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And so it is in the blogosphere: the “A-listers” tend to link predominantly to one another, which not only keeps their readerships circulating mainly amongst themselves, but also drives up all of their search engine rankings and profiles within social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us, thereby sending them even more readers.

Meanwhile, millions of other bloggers are blogging their heart out to audiences of zero to a handful. Yet so many of these so-called “Long Tail” bloggers are writing amazing, enthralling stuff that is quite the equal of that produced by more famous bloggers and that many, many people would surely love to read. The problem is, they don’t have the right kind of connections with well-known bloggers, or a sufficiently high public profile, or enough knack for self-promotion to leverage the sheer quality of their blog to reach those potential readers.

Still everything to play for

But we’re just at the beginning of blogging as a mainstream phenomenon. At Blog Friends, we see no reason why the blogosphere has to continue to blindy mimic the iniquities of traditional “free market” socioeconomics (the rich getting richer and the poor poorer). By contrast, we are hoping and praying that the blogosphere will begin to become a fairer and more transparent place in 2008. A place where cronyism is peripheral in determining the profile of any given blog, and where quality will out.

How is that going to happen? We have no idea. Who would be bold and/or foolish enough to predict the evolution of such a fast-moving and dynamic system as the blogosphere? But we do have some ideas for some experiments to conduct, in our tiny Blog Friends corner of the web, in service of our vision:

Blog Friends—ideas to level the blogosphere playing field

• Blog Friends 100: a leaderboard of top recent blog posts by our blogger users, where quality is judged by the proportion of readers for each post who say they like it, rather than by sheer reader numbers or incoming link count.
• “Blog Friend me!” blog badges that encourage blog readers to favourite the blogger within Blog Friends, which will also put the blogger’s posts in front of that reader’s own fans. A social way to spread blog readership!
• “Reach” reward points for sending new users to Blog Friends and for skillful “curating” (recommending great authors and posts to others). These Reach points could then be “spent” on increasing the number of views your posts get in others’ profiles and Rivers.
• Better recommendations in users’ Rivers. By factoring in the number of positive ratings posts and/or authors receive, we can hope to reward quality bloggers with more readers. At the same time, we hope to improve our Reader users’ experience too.
• Statistics for bloggers, helping them to work out which posts and which kinds of posts are popular with their readership.
• Twitter / Tumblr integration, making it easy for you to share post recommendations with friends—and for others to share your posts with their friends.

These are just a selection of the ideas we’ve been pondering over our Christmas puddings. And we’re sure that many new, and maybe even some better ideas will occur to us or to you, our honoured users, as we plunge forwards with Blog Friends’ development in the New Year.

Getting the technology out of people’s way

But, Blog Friends aside, I want to close by coming back to the larger point of this post. The blogosphere has the potential to be a truly amazing medium for people to share wisdom with one another. For every great blogger, there are readers who would care passionately about what you write if they could find you. For every reader, there are so many great blogs that could satisfy your thirst for informative, entertaining and/or inspiring writing. If the technology can somehow become transparent and dynamic enough to simply get out of the way of those relationships forming, there will be no stopping the blogosphere’s triumphant onwards march!