The grouchy old bear says:
So far not one big blogger has written to tell me that s/he is willing to help judge the proposed quality awards. I don’t understand their indifference.
Our blogs are successful (in part) because smaller bloggers read us, and link to us. I can’t understand why the big bloggers aren’t willing to return the favor by helping to organize a contest that recognizes high quality posts, written by smaller bloggers, and rewards them with links and traffic.
I am a cranky cynic who appreciates Dovie’s idea but is not so sure about the concept. The idea of having a panel read/judge posts is not a horrible idea. It certainly has merit. The issue is more along the lines of trying to determine who the panel members should be.
You see the fact that someone has a big blog is not indicative of quality writing. Some bloggers have managed to grow based upon the community that has formed around them. It is kind of the dive bar concept. You don’t go there for the food/drinks but for the atmosphere around the place.
To paraphrase Cheer’s ” it is a place where everyone knows your name.” There are a number of different blogs out there that are like this. You don’t go there expecting to see the blog-ha-bayit (landlord/blogger) produce brilliant content. You go because it is fun to hang out with the people around there.
To be clear, I do appreciate the grouchy old bear’s idea and his effort. We’ll have to wait and see if it pans out.
Mark,
You? Cynical. Nah. 😉
What drives his traffic then? It’s the people who come for the conversation. He’s got a lot more comments and his regulars keep coming back.
I would agree.
It depends where you look whether or not you see indifference. On the right side of the blogosphere there’s a weekly contest called the Watcher’s Council.
For my part I try to have regular link dumps and I run Haveil Havalim, which hopefully give less visited blogs a bit of publicity. (For that matter too, DB gives other bloggers a chance to shine when he goes on vacation.)
I’d disagree with DB though that there’s a correlation between incoming links and visits. He gets between 3 to 4 the number of visitors that I get but I have about 100 – 120 more incoming links than he does.
So I rank higher in TTLB and Technorati, but he ranks higher in Google Page Rank.
What drives his traffic then? It’s the people who come for the conversation. He’s got a lot more comments and his regulars keep coming back.
Finally, there’s a big difference in what I’d consider a quality post and what he’d consider a quality post. I suspect that’s the same throughout the blogosphere, so the practicality of the suggestion is probably about nil.
I don’t understand their indifference.”
I do. It’s called ego run amok.
So you have a big blog and get lots of traffic. Whoopie shit.
Was that cynical?
:o)>