Smelling Rank

Oh look, now Feedster has a top X list. Yawn. That’s what the blogosphere needs, more ordinal rankings. It’s all about knowing where you are on the pecking order and who you are higher than. It’s all about re-instituting points of centralization in this decentralized world and making sure you know where you stand. It’s not about self-expression and new voices, it is about building brands and creating blockbusters and being “hot”.

People may think it is cute to put those “Feedster 500” badges on their site, but everytime I see one I just feel disappointed.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

10 thoughts on “Smelling Rank”

  1. I’d like to change your mind. You are right insofar as the blogosphere doesn’t need the list. However, readers who are new to the blogosphere are more comfortable starting from this sort of base. Hopefully, they’ll find gateways to the smaller, passionate communities that Jarvis talks about and actively participate.

  2. Speaking from the perspective of a fairly new blogger. I’ve been reading blogs for about a year now, I’ve seen different topics and different styles.

    I started blogging about a month ago, and if I didn’t have other blogs to see as a reference, I’d have been lost and given up long ago.

    What I also noticed is, like Dave says, there are so many! Why more? I don’t even know about half of them, and I think neither does anyone!

    Isn’t this all about expression? Isn’t this all about release? Sure, if someone reads my posts once in a while, I’m fine. I didn’t start blogging to have a devoted readership, I started because I wanted to express myself.

    Right now, the blogosphere is more about ratings than about expression. Yeah, we’d all like some more readers, but its not a competition.

    PS: Dave, nice to see you sticking it to the man again! Right on!

  3. I saw that… I got an e-mail to a list or something I’m on that said “Your Site Is # 6” and I was like, how is MY site #6? I have like 4 readers, so yeah, I’m nowhere near the top 500… Of course if anyone wants to come over and read it, um, I’d appreciate it 🙂

    -A

  4. Isn;t this where profiling come in to play ?

    If enough information is tracked about me, then a system could tell me what the most relevent and valuable content (to me) would be.

    Of course someone might poison the information and the system would wrongly think I have intrests I don;t have.

    Profiles do have some merit, but it need to be dynamic, and based on content I choose, not of a bunch of checkboxes.

    How about if I gave an rss reader my chosen feeds, podcasts list, del.icio.us feed, and flickr feed and maybe a month of emails, would I get a good top 500 feed list?

    Of course, what is not mentioned, and should be, is that I (and presumably others) download many podcasts, but only listen to a portion of them.

    I think ITConversations has a good system, where I rate podcasts when I remove them from my queue.
    So far, the star system works ok for me with ITC, but I had to find ITC first.

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