Blogging is for Everybody
Aaron Brazell is filling in at ProBlogger while Darren is on holiday, and decided to stir things up with his first post -- Blogs Are About Being Elite. The catalyst for his post was Technorati's inclusion of MySpace in its index, and his argument boils down to "it’s a good thing to be in the elite and it’s highly unfair to those of us who work hard to position our blogs in strategically excellent positioning to have the pool of content thinned by less than excellent content."
My response is that the whole 'elitist' thing is a load of crap.
Firstly because it labels as inferior a whole lot of blogs based on nothing but where they're hosted. In this case it's MySpace, but other 'elite' bloggers have said the same things about Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga and many others. Windows vs. MacOs vs. Linux. vi vs. Emacs. Movable Type vs. Greymatter. AOL vs. Everybody. Seriously, get over it.
Secondly I disagree with Aaron's presumption that all bloggers do it to make money. News flash, Aaron, it just ain't so. Not everybody cares about their PageRank. They don't care about SERPs and won't even know what you're talking about if you bring it up. Josh, one of the commenters, is right when he says that Technorati (or any other search engine) will fade away and die if it doesn't return good results to its users, but he's totally wrong when he says "Yes, everyone who has a blog works for a high PageRank." That may be true for everyone who blogs for money (or tries to) but I think that's actually a very small minority of people who create blogs.
But the main reason Aaron is wrong is because the whole idea behind blogging was that it was anti-elitist. Blogging software was created so that anybody could publish on the web. Blogging means everybody has a voice. It means everybody can be part of the conversation. Links and blogrolls and trackbacks and blog search engines all help us filter out the noise and find new voices we never would've found on our own.
The beauty of blogging is that almost anybody can do it. The beauty of good search engines and other filters is that if they totally suck, I never have to read it.
My response is that the whole 'elitist' thing is a load of crap.
Firstly because it labels as inferior a whole lot of blogs based on nothing but where they're hosted. In this case it's MySpace, but other 'elite' bloggers have said the same things about Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga and many others. Windows vs. MacOs vs. Linux. vi vs. Emacs. Movable Type vs. Greymatter. AOL vs. Everybody. Seriously, get over it.
Secondly I disagree with Aaron's presumption that all bloggers do it to make money. News flash, Aaron, it just ain't so. Not everybody cares about their PageRank. They don't care about SERPs and won't even know what you're talking about if you bring it up. Josh, one of the commenters, is right when he says that Technorati (or any other search engine) will fade away and die if it doesn't return good results to its users, but he's totally wrong when he says "Yes, everyone who has a blog works for a high PageRank." That may be true for everyone who blogs for money (or tries to) but I think that's actually a very small minority of people who create blogs.
But the main reason Aaron is wrong is because the whole idea behind blogging was that it was anti-elitist. Blogging software was created so that anybody could publish on the web. Blogging means everybody has a voice. It means everybody can be part of the conversation. Links and blogrolls and trackbacks and blog search engines all help us filter out the noise and find new voices we never would've found on our own.
The beauty of blogging is that almost anybody can do it. The beauty of good search engines and other filters is that if they totally suck, I never have to read it.
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