Why Popularity Matters

It is understood in the weblog world that popularity doesn't matter. No one cares about popularity. No one cares about how much traffic they get. No one cares how much they get linked. It is wrong to imply otherwise. Those who talk about getting linked or how much traffic they get or their Beebo ranking -- or even pay attention to such things -- are obviously shallow and clueless. We all just do this for ourselves and whoever else wants to tune in and could care less how we compare to others. Right?

There are now, by my estimates, 20,000 or so active blogs on the web. Approximately 300 new ones are created every day on Blogger alone. This, you can agree, is far too many to look at individually and decide which ones you might find interesting. If you look through the 5,500+ blogs in the Blogger directory, for instance, you'll probably spend a lot of time before you find anything that catches your interest. Because that's the way it should be. If my sister-in-law creates a blog about her new baby to share events and pictures with her friends and family, or if three junior-high-school girls start a blog to talk about their friends and interests, there's no reason in the world you should expect to find that interesting (unless you're in my family or a junior-high-school girl) -- and no reason they would care whether or not you do. These types of blogs, in fact, will be more and more common and make up the majority of blogs in the future -- every day communication tools for every day people who want to talk with a small circle of friends, family, acquaintances, or co-workers.

But here's the problem: Out of those 20,000 blogs, there are probably a couple dozen that you would find interesting, amusing, or insightful enough to check out daily or weekly. How do you find these blogs -- and new ones as they come up? One way, would be to somehow find out what the most other people are reading lately -- i.e., what's popular. This is, of course, wrong and shallow and meaningless information in the weblog world. But, in other worlds, popularity is considered a somewhat legitimate measure and useful filtering tool (among others, of course). For example, many people find bestseller lists useful for finding new and noteworthy books. Whether they admit it or not, people are often swayed by finding out what the current most popular brand of camera or laptop or other item they are considering purchasing is. And, on the web, the search engine most highly regarded for giving the best results uses essentially the same criteria as Beebo -- popularity, based on the number of incoming links.

I'm not going to suggest that popularity ensures quality. Certainly, in the worlds of television and Hollywood, the opposite seems to sometimes be true (but things like The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and American Beauty still sometimes slip through and are successful). However, one nice thing about the web is that those who get into the running in the first place isn't determined by some twisted Hollywood system or a goal to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

What I will suggest is that: 1) Statistically speaking, one is more likely to find blogs of interest for them among those that other people find interesting. Yes, there will always be gems that haven't hit most people's radar yet or that you and only three others in the world find absoluely amazing. Popularity is just one tool. (Collaborative filtering, a more sophisticated form of popularity ranking, could be a potentially more useful one.)
2) If you choose to (and, let me stress, it's perfectly legitimate if you don't!), there is nothing wrong with attempting to create something many people (beyond your friends and family) will appreciate and find valuable/interesting/amusing/whatever. 3) If we weren't so damn democratic and would augment the Recently Updated, Recently Created, and Directory lists on Blogger with some indication of what people were reading -- e.g., the "Hot" list that we had in the design at one time, but decided to nix before launching it -- it would help the genre, because it would steer people towards interesting things, encourage people to create interesting things, and (hopefully) reduce the number of people who decide there is nothing of value here because they randomly selected a few blogs and, naturally, landed on my sister-in-law or the three junior-high-girls who weren't even talking to them (or some that just happen to suck, as most things in most genres do) -- even though they would never use the same random-selection criteria to judge the web as a whole, or any other medium for that matter.