Email This Post: Bloggers, We’re Not Really Competing With You

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Some people say that the blogs we run for our communities compete with other blogs with similar topics. I say these people don’t entirely get the concept of social media and how it can be of value to them.


I’m sure you all heard of the maxim, “the rising tide raises all boats.” For our purposes, and taking Ningin our Asian community as an example, the boats are Asian media related sites and the tide is the total amount of traffic in the entire Asian media space. What we’re trying to do is raise that tide. And we do this by centralizing and organizing all the content in the space through all the different applications we build (wiki, forums, social news). Then information becomes easier to find and quality and noteworthy content rises to the top. Many of you know about Wikipedia, Digg, and Flickr and their tremendous influence in shaping web traffic. Our idea is to take the best things about them and use it to help to our communities like how they did for the internet as a whole.


Also, blogs are inherently a social medium. It benefits from interacting with not just users, but other bloggers covering the same topic. When you make a blog posting, you don’t just create content, you initiate a conversation. The conversation can continue on your blog via users comments or it can continue on someone else’s blog via trackbacks.


Another thing to consider is that blogs are generally more personal commentary then news reporting. Often they are news reporting packaged with personal opinion. So having multiple bloggers give their commentary on a news item only adds to the conversation ultimately giving more value to the readers. Unless your blog consist entirely of paraphrased AP newswire articles, I can see how you feel competed against. However, the competition you’re facing is Yahoo News, CNN, and NYTimes to name a few, not other bloggers.


Lastly, I don’t subscribe to the theory that reader attention is a zero sum game. Sure it’s a finite number, but it’s also a dynamic number. Readers come and go base on the quality of the content more than any other consideration. 
 
Read the rest here: http://mixrmedia.com/blog/comments/bloggers_were_not_really_competing_with_you/
Email This Post: Bloggers, We’re Not Really Competing With You

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