In my work organizing Blogs United I've read and followed blogs large and small.
If there is one kind of blog or blogging that I think gets short shrift in the current progressive blogosphere it would be what I'm going to call the "long tail blog."
What is a long tail blog and why should you care about them and perhaps consider starting one of your own?
Read more below...
Chris Anderson's long tail is a hot concept that, has nevertheless, been underutilized by progressive blogs.
Without going into needless detail, the idea of the long tail as applied to bloggers has a simple pragmatic application. There are two main blocs of readers for our writing, both being, believe it or not, effectively roughly equal in size:
a) those who read our posts immediately and come to us directly
b) those who find our posts through searches
The two audiences are vastly different. The first audience reads our writing because they come to our blogs frequently and seek that writing out. These readers are drawn from a finite, but expandable, pool. The second group, the ones coming through searches, come to our writing on the blogs because they are seeking out information that we've written about. These folks are drawn from a much wider pool of potential readers. These readers don't all arrive at once, but rather, slowly, over time through search engines like google or yahoo.
That distinction is critical.
I would argue that the vast majority of writing on progressive blogs is wholly oriented towards the first group of readers, let's call them "the choir."
You can tell this because posts in the progressive blogosphere tend to be:
That just tends to be the way things are on the blogs: we "short tail" bloggers write for "the choir" and, when you get down to it, why wouldn't we? Writing for the largest immediate audience, ie. the head of the distribution curve, is a natural thing to do. Of course, that creates the current blogosphere-wide landscape that is not very user friendly to those seekers on the long tail who come to us more for our information than our immediate political impact.
We can call the folks in the long tail: "the seekers."
One of the things that I've noticed in covering local and regional blogs is that these local bloggers have to, of necessity, focus their writing more on "the seekers."
Local and regional bloggers realize that the pool of potential readers in "the choir" (ie. readers who want to read about local politics every day) is relatively small when compared to the pool of people in "the seekers" who might be interested, sometime in the next few months, to read about local politics from time to time.
Because of this, local bloggers have to pay much closer attention to the long tail...and, in effect, are more akin to slow motion "citizen journalists" or "journalist activists" than the "citizen pundits" who are their "short tail" brethren.
Long tail bloggers:
A long tail blog need not be local or regional. In fact, all blogs have an audience made up both of "seekers" and "choir". All blogs need both, in fact, since comments, the interactive and sticky aspect of a blog, are per force a phenomenon of the first part of the distribution curve of readers, the choir.
The key thing a "long tail" blog does, however, is to keep its content friendly to "the seekers" by focusing on two factors:
1. making it as easy as possible to find the blog's content through searches (ie. SEO)
2. structuring the content itself for the "search-oriented" audience
In effect, the long tail blog is an elaboration on the concept that Chris Bowers enunciated with his push for "google bombing" last fall: creating easy-to-find, information-rich posts oriented towards seekers. The critical difference is that "long tail blogging" describes a year-round activity. I am convinced that long tail blogging represents a way of writing and a way of blogging that is not just different, but has profound implications for the effectiveness and reach of the progressive blogosphere.
Now, I can imagine there are all sorts of crucial distinctions and hybrids that we could talk about here. (ie. are community blogs, by their nature, short tail? don't most blogs mix both styles and do both? etc. etc.) But as a long-time veteran of writing for large, partisan community-blogs, I would say that, once you get your head around it, the concept of writing with a long tail audience in mind is absolutely revolutionary. In some ways, for all its strengths, the current blogosphere's relentless focus on the traffic at the head of the distribution curve has been one of its greatest blindnesses and weak spots. We are simply too much about "the choir" and, given a second's thought, it's obvious how that fact has shaped our movement to this day.
Last fall I proselytized for any and every one in the netroots to start or join a local or regional blog. The thought behind this move was my realization that local "seekers" following congressional races simply do not find these large community hives where tens of thousands of us blog day in and day out to be friendly or accesible sources of information.
We needed to go local.
The answer, however, was not so simple as "blogging the way we always did" but on an independent URL covering local politics for a tiny audience. In fact, the counterintuitive aspects of that notion were probably a disincentive for most diarists to ever break off and found or join a local blog. Why would anyone ever want to leave the short tail audience? Why not write about local politics FOR the massive and immediate audience of a large blog?
Well, because when you do that you tend to miss pretty much the entire audience of seekers, you miss the long tail.
What I'm saying now is that bloggers who launch new blogs need to incorporate the power of the long tail audience, need to see the steady accumulation of "seeker" readers as central to their approach. Even bloggers in the current crop of large traffic-oriented blogs would do well to think more about the long tail audience of seekers, to see them as potential readers and understand their needs.
I am convinced that, just as "local and regional" blogs were the hot development last election season that "long tail blogs" covering all sorts of topics, and including a ton of local and regional blogs, will be the hot development this election cycle.
Long tail blogging is nothing new, but the concept behind it is the fuel that fires much of our rhetoric; we all want to reach out to that vast audience of readers hungry for the facts.
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Please share this! Creative Commons, Paul Delehanty, 2007
Note: I hope you found this essay useful. If you are a local or regional or long tail blogger interested in joining Blogs United and discussing the nitty gritty of HOW you can actually do the above, or just want to drop me a line with a question: email me at kidoaklandactivism@comcast.net
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