I was thinking today about blogs and Tom Coates’ Secret Santa and blogrolls, and how when you see someone’s name on a blogroll it doesn’t really tell you anything about them or whether you’d enjoy their blog.
Maybe it’s just me but I hardly ever click on a blogroll link. That said, my stats indicate that the majority of people find me via Google searches or blog indexes rather than blogrolls, so maybe it’s not just me.
A little bit better is to see a blog quoted by one of my regular reads – it gives me a taste of what this unknown blogger’s style is like and, if I enjoy it, I might go and take a closer look. But I think that better than that would be to read a whole guest post.
It’d be taking interbloggedness to a higher level, letting bloggers reach new audiences, getting a bit more cross-pollination happening, trying to fatten up the tail of the blogosphere power law curve. It’d be particularly juicy if guests were writing for blogs that weren’t already in the same corner of the blogosphere as themselves. There must be loads of blogs out there that I'd enjoy that I just haven't found yet, and it'd be cool to swap content with some of them.
I’m not suggesting a team blog here, but just occasional guest posts on each other’s blogs. The fact that bloggers of a feather flock together would be a plus point – the bloggers I read on a daily basis write in a style that I suspect my audience (nano or otherwise) would enjoy, and they are people I’d be perfectly happy to write a blog entry for.
What I’d like to do, if I had the coding expertise, would be to set up a site where you could register yourself as a guest blogger and/or your blog as a guest-friendly publication, and with a bit of metadata and a search facility you’ve got a way for bloggers who might not otherwise find each other to hook up and swap content.
You could do reciprocals, where two bloggers exchange content, or non-reciprocals were someone can either host content or write content – whatever suits them and the guest blogging community. It’d be like the bastard multi-parented son of a not-so-Secret Santa, Friendster, and Blogroll.
To me, that seems like a really good idea – at least, it did this morning whilst I was in the shower.
Or, you could just e-mail the blog entry and have the person whose site it is post it. 🙂
Visit me @ http://joshmann.blog-city.com
Well… yes, technically you could. But how would you know who was up for trading posts? And how would you find bloggers who were into the idea of guest blogging if you didn't know about them already?
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