There is a dialog that is going on in part sparked by Andrew Keen’s book, Cult of the Amateur. He draws the analogy of monkeys and typewriters. This comes from Aldous Huxley that famously said give enough monkeys typewriters and eventually they will write something rivaling Shakespeare. It is just a matter of getting enough monkeys with typewriters.
In many circles there is a bashing of the drivel found in the blogosphere. That perhaps it is driven by quantity and not quality. I think this is in many levels a problem in our society. The idea that “more is better”. This goes for everything from security to money to love to material possessions.
Some of this is more benign then others – more security equals more fear and ultimately more weapons and violence. While, more blogs ultimately results in more voices which means far more views being shared.
It is this quality of the blogosphere that makes more better. It is after all a type of democratization of thought and expression. No need to try and get your letter published in the New York Times or get to speak on TV. Just go to your blog and write. This is what democracy means to me – the ability to share and perhaps even influence.
Here is the one crucial difference that I believe adds even more value to the blogosphere. If you write drivel, no one is going to read it! If you write something that is of high quality and important you will get response and recognition. This is regardless of who you are or how many Adwords you have on your site or any of that other technical stuff.
When I explore the blog world I often come across sites that talk about SEO, Adwords and many other “techniques” for getting your blog out there and read. There are always those that successfully manipulate the system to gain attention and money. But, for me it is the quality; those are the blogs I will bookmark and go back to time and again. Not because they have the right search words to pull them up. Sure, I may read them once, but if it is crappy and poorly written I am not interested.
This then goes back to one of my earlier posts (which, I admit, was written under the haze of a sleep deprived new father) which attempted to argue that conversational marketing holds far greater value then any other form of marketing. It utilizes information already available. It targets those that are already interested in the topic. It is quality over quantity. Anyone can mass email, but not just anyone can do a targeted and focused effort that utilizes the information available.
Write quality and the people will follow. Otherwise I say let the monkeys play in the jungle! Hell, give’em typewriters who knows what wonderful policy they may come up with!!
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