Popularizing Blog Content

On a call with representatives from Technorati, an Internet search engine for blogs, and Truviso, provider of next-generation data analytic solutions, yesterday, I took some time to discuss "popular" content in the blogosphere and whether we need to give it a special throne.

Truviso and Technorati have combined their technologies to measure what they're calling "the pulse of the blogosphere." The new technology, which will appear on Technorati, is called "Live Channel Clouds" -- essentially a popular content cloud that continuously updates based on what people are writing about in the blogosphere, allowing you to see what topics are important to the 'sphere by their growing/shrinking size.

"The bigger they are, the more you can see how important they are to people in the blogosphere. Words shrinking in size are being deemphasized in the blogosphere," says Robert Arriaga, director of product development at Technorati. "It's a great way for people to see what's important to people in the blogosphere right now."

The feature itself is cool, as it demonstrates in "real time" which keywords are hitting the bloggers' collective sweet spots, and which aren't.

But why should I really care what the nine gazillion (I counted) other blog writers think is important? I, myself, have this brain thing that is in decent condition (the eBay seller marked it as "like new"). So why can't I just use that to determine what I want to read about? Moreover, doesn't promoting popular content take the eyeballs away from unique ideas?

"It creates a sense of community," says Arriaga about the "most popular" cloud. "It allows people to discover what is important to other bloggers." Without this feature, Arriaga says, we would "remove insight that people have into the blogosphere as a community."

But it also creates and pushes the opportunity for people to blog about something just because other people are. "A lot of times there's a 'me too' factor where people discover things they didn't know about -- and want to talk about it as well," says Arriaga. "A lot of times there's a spark point in blogosphere."

Or, a lot of times people blog about a popular subject in hopes of getting noticed on a popular list. We see this happening on sites like Techmeme where bloggers often join the hip-happening "discussion" for the sake of having their content schmooze on the site with other popular content. "That's also the 'me too' factor," says Arriaga.

In that sense, if you're looking to the blogosphere for original ideas and opinions, you may want to venture off the most popular lists.

— Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution