February 14, 2006
New York Magazine on the Blog Establishment
New York Magazine has a cover story on Blogging, with überblogger Peter Rojas on the front page.
A short cut to the chapters covered:
Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom by Clive Thompson
... if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work.
... Shirky's curve is a “power-law distribution.” Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s capital, while almost everyone else has little or none.
More:
"A blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day—hell, every few minutes—even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience.
[via calacanis.com]
And the February issue of Vanity Fair has a one page story on Gawker Media, dubed the "Snark Set" , page 76. ... In the Denton Blogosphere, there's no Paris Hilton item too insignificant to link and no wisecrack too cheap to make. With a combination of smart-ass writing and low subject matter folded into crisply designed sites, the Gawker gang is bringing some wit and nasty fun to a dour decade.
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