Cory Doctorow has an interesting new article up on the Locus web site (which I probably should have read on paper but didn’t get an interrupt on). I was pleased to see a new rationale for not publishing reviews long before a book is available in the shops, but the thing that jumped out at me was this:
After all, the majority of links between blogs have been made to or from blogs with four or fewer inbound links in total — that means that the Internet has figured out a cost-effective means of helping audiences of three people discover the writers they should be reading.
That’s what I call a long tail. And the converse is the spike. I’m assuming that Cory got that data from Technorati. Those blogs would all have an authority of 4 or less, and a ranking somewhere in the millions. This blog has an authority of 36 and a ranking of around 272,000. SFAW is up to 73 and 124,000, while the Hugo Awards site manages a ranking of just under 100,000 with just 15 points more authority. Cory’s blog, Boing! Boing!, is currently ranked 5, and has an authority of 16,730. See what I mean by a spike?
This is, of course, just an example of a more general phenomenon. Only a few people get to play Premier League soccer, or star in a Hollywood blockbuster, or get to govern their nation. The trick, I guess, is to find one small area of personal endeavour in which you are in the spike, not in the tail.
That quote is very amusing indeed. But is the analysis sound? The quote reads as if he has equated the size of the audience with the number of links. He surely doesn’t need me to tell him is not the same thing.
If the actual point he is making has to do with how much effort literary bloggers invest for the benefit of a disappointing number of readers, I wouldn’t be surprised if that is true.
That is one of the few advantages of paper fanzines, there is an identified community of readers. If someone sends his zine to one or two hundred fans, most of them will probably look it over whether or not they read the whole thing. That might be a trivial number of readers to the Premier League bloggers, but for the small fry it might look pretty good.
Obviously Links <> Readers, but web log data is not public, and in any case is notoriously inaccurate as a measure of readers. A link is clear public proof of someone not only having read a work, but liked it enough to link to it.
I think the point Cory is making is that the Internet is a wonderful tool for putting writers in touch with people who like what they do, even if they are very much a niche market. If I have a dispute with his analysis, it is on the basis that many of those low-readership links are probably made between the blogs of people who already know each other, and are therefore not evidence of information flow though the network.
Thanks to you I’ve found Google Analytics, and can feel confident that my blog has 17 faithful readers. And I love the world map showing the cities where they’re from. The spammers, too. At least, I don’t think any fans have been to Marrakech or Kuala Lumpur since the Sixties.
For shame, more people should read you!
I was up over 150 for a while, but this idiot project I’ve been on has meant a lot of days of not much content so it is down under 100 again. You can be history very quickly on the web.
I love the map too. And what is more I know that I have readers in Brazil and Malaysia and Finland and New Zealand because they leave comments. Possibly my reader in Kuala Lumpur clicked through from me to you once.
You’re certainly right about people discovering my blog through your site. Right after you linked to the First Fandom story, Google recorded lots of hits from Europe. At other times, fans in Finland and Poland have posted comments.
Excellent, glad to be of service. 🙂
My top referrer is, of course, Scalzi. SFAW sends a lot of people here, and after that is Kevin. Not surprising, really.
I’m less and less enthralled by Technorati.
I’ve been watching the blog response on CC26, and Google Blog Search consistently returns more results than Technorati.