Michael Koby

Well, not when it comes to the opinion of bloggers anyway.  According to some research folk (you can see graphs here).  The link points to the blog of Jeremiah Owyang, a Senior Analyst of Social Computing at Forrester Research (how does one get that job?).  In the post, he specifically looks at 3 different reports that show people trust the opinions of bloggers the least.

My response to this? “Well duh” and maybe even a “We needed reports to show this?”

Bloggers are people, and the average person does not know too much about a blogger so the trust level is low by default.  Now, a blogger can build trust among their readership but this is few and far between.  The opinions of a blogger are just that, an opinion.  And to many it is the opinion of a stranger.  Also blogs are still considered by most to be a “new” form of media so a blog will not garner the same level of trust as say a well known magazine or newspaper.

I wonder how these reports translate to the blogs of popular newspapers.  Does the blogger from the New York Times have more default trust than say someone like me?  I wonder what the pshycological implications are with regards to having your blog hosted on the newyorktimes.com.  I wonder if they carry more weight with the average consumer than just a stand alone blog.

If you are a blogger looking to build your credibility, take a look at this Speed Post article over at Problogger entitled, How do I Build Credibility and Presence Online.

Darren Rowse, the Problogger is conducting a nice little exercise in “Speed Posting” where he takes a question from Twitter, and answers it in a post. The catch is he has to write the response in 3 minutes or less. It is proving to be a very informative exercise if you are reading them. Below I link to a couple of them:

How Much Traffic Should a Blog Have Before Running Advertising

9 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Posting to Your Blog

If you have been following professional blogger, Robert Scoble then you have probably hear that he has replaced Techmeme with FriendFeed as his homepage.  He claims that this is so he can see and hear the smaller voices of the blogging community and find the newest "superstars" since the blogging community has pretty much hit a gap in fresh voices.

Scoble’s correct when he says that the corporate blogger has taken over Techmeme.  Everyday it seems like the same publishers are getting their content on Techmeme throughout the day.  Sure, a smaller publisher might get lucky and lad on the front page, but its rare.  But what does it mean to say a blog is "corporate"?  Is TechCrunch corporate?  I think what Robert Scoble is refering to is the technology blogging elite.  Those people that get first rate access to new sites and new information.

Dave Winer mentioned something similar in his article, Proof That the End is Near, where he talks about the "tech industry superdelegates" and how he is unfollowing them on Twitter in hope to find the smaller voices as well.  It seems that some of the more popular people are looking for the smaller, most likely more original voices in the blogging industry.  No longer are they interested in what someone has to say about what TechCrunch, GigaOM, or even Mashable have to say anymore.  Well they might be interested, but they might move past the headline anymore.

So can FriendFeed help the smaller blogger?  If more people move to the "everybody" tab more frequently then there is that possibility.  If Techmeme and other such sites can utilize the comment system in FriendFeed to help determine the more popular stories, links, and such then it could help the lesser known bloggers become more known.  At least for a while anyway.  Once the more elite bloggers take over the space, it might become a useless practice.

One could utilize something like Yahoo Pipes to filter out the more elite bloggers when they start to move on the FriendFeed space.  But will the extra work be worth it?  Well that is something only time will tell.  I think that FriendFeed can help the smaller blogger become more popular if people are looking for new original voices (like me!).  But someone has to be looking for those people and link to them.  Forget the Pentiums, it’s all about the links.

My good friend Rachel over at the website, Thrifty Domestica got into a discussion about micro-blogging today.  When I asked her if she was going to start micro-blogging, she told me that she was going to write a post about how ridiculous micro-blogging was.  I told her “if you write it, I’ll link it” and so here we are.  Rachel’s thoughts on micro-blogging.

Micro-blogging is for Nerds

In response, I think that she understands the point, but doesn’t understand the conversation aspect of it.  When you record those little thoughts that one can’t always pan out into a full fledge 500-ish word blog post, someone might become inspired and make that post for you.  That person might have a perspective that you don’t have.  I know that there are a lot of wasted ideas out there, heck there are several a day that don’t make it to here from my end.

Either way, it’s interesting food for thought.  Check out the post, leave a comment your two.