Monday, March 08, 2004

How News Travels on the Internet

Stephen VanDyke has created an illustration that addresses a question that's been niggling at my brain for a while: Where do bloggers get this stuff?

Now I know. Pull it from Google news or e-mail, lift from other bloggers, quote, comment, modify, parodize.

Hmmm. Same thing I do (like this), except that I throw in some original stuff (you never saw my choir piece anywhere else). But I don't know if that adds value or not ("adding value" in this case means making my blog something people are more inclined to read frequently).

Remember Lena, the Ukrainian motorcyclist who traveled through the Chernobyl wasteland? Fascinating story. Great pictures. She's famous, and I don't think she had any expectation of that happening. Her original content went all over the web and out to the Greater Blogosphere (see VanDyke's graph).

I'm sorry to talk backstage like this for you folks who don't care a lick, but I know a lot of bloggers read each other's works. Do you folks wonder about this, too? It's not about the numbers, but when your site meter records 4 hits per day, it's disheartening. When it spikes, you wonder if you're doing something right. And then the numbers become a kind of game, too.

Anyway, check out the link. VanDyke links a couple of others, such as BlogPulse, which actually tracks the common blog memes (I never knew three months ago that I'd actually be using the term "blog memes" in a sentence. Scary), common ideas bouncing around from blog to blog

Sometimes the blogosphere seems not so much like atmosphere as like a breeder reactor.

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