Blogebrity Interview

A few days ago, I noticed some traf­fic com­ing from a site I hadn’t seen before. Appar­ently, I had been clas­si­fied as a B-list blog­ger. The site, called Blo­gebrity, has since started to gar­ner a fair amount of atten­tion. I caught up with one of the site’s cre­ators over IM. Here’s a quick IM inter­view, done in the style Jason blogs in:

TNLNYC:

Con­grats on the slash­dot­ting. How are your server and ego hold­ing up?

blo­gebrity:

well, right now we’re hosted on the Con­ta­gious Media servers, which seem to be weath­er­ing all the traf­fic storms well. As for ego… Noth­ing like a nice slash­dot­ting to keep you some­what hum­ble… some­what being an oper­a­tive word *haha*

TNLNYC:

Here’s a dumb, and pos­si­bly recur­sive, ques­tion: when will blo­gebrity appear on the blo­gebrity list?

blo­gebrity:

HA! Well, as we work to make the sys­tem fully auto­mated, i guess it is pos­si­ble, based on the cri­te­ria we des­ig­nate, we COULD turn up there but man.…right now we’d def­i­nitely catch some heat for it.

TNLNYC:

and what are those criteria?

blo­gebrity:

well, we’re try­ing to basi­cally take it from a more Yahoo-style index (with a lot of human edit­ing), to some­thing more Googleish and
algo­rith­mic… if that’s even pos­si­ble… an A-list algo­rithm could be tricky

TNLNYC:

any details? just rip­ping off Tech­no­rati? Any other approach?

blo­gebrity:

Well, we’re try­ing to add in extra details to account for… like if a blogger’s made tv appear­ances, or got­ten cor­po­rate media atten­tion… and more focus on WHO is link­ing to you and what their rep­u­ta­tion is. And finally… try­ing to add in for Rep­u­ta­tion Mon­i­tor­ing, so if some­one posts a bunch of B.S., they aren’t ranked as high as some­one who con­sis­tently deliv­ers truth/accuracy

TNLNYC:

but isn’t truth/accuracy a sub­jec­tive term? Espe­cially when it comes to some of the polit­i­cal blogs?

blo­gebrity:

oh yeah, totally.

TNLNYC:

how do you account for that?

blo­gebrity:

yeah, that’s what we’re wrestling with. Some peo­ple over here think a mostly human-edited sys­tem is more the way to go. I keep argu­ing about how much we can auto­mate it but as it devel­ops, we will share more with the pub­lic and call for some input.

TNLNYC:

Over the last 48 hours, you’ve been get­ting a lot of link flow… the mag­a­zine, accord­ing to your site, arrives “sum­mer 2005″… What does that mean in terms of sched­ule? Is sum­mer a may-june sched­ule our is it more some­thing along the lines of before the end of September?

blo­gebrity:

yeah, def­i­nitely later in the sum­mer for any­thing in print. Right now, the focus is on our “full” blog site. Right now on the con­ta­gious media servers, we can’t really go to town and install what­ever we want so we’ll be launch­ing a full site, on MT or Dru­pal, with a full mes­sage board and other good­ies, in June… and then iron­ing out the details on any print, or other media exten­sions of Blogebrity.

TNLNYC:

and is there a busi­ness model behind the blog? behind the magazine?

blo­gebrity:

HA–business model? Again… We’re sort of iron­ing it out as we go.… When it started, we knew we had an inter­est­ing con­cept but we never dreamed it would get so much atten­tion so fast. The coolest part is—all the atten­tion is draw­ing more and more people/contributions our way.

TNLNYC:

So, at this time, it’s more of an idea that you’re try­ing to turn into a business?

blo­gebrity:

yeah, i’d say that’s a pretty accu­rate assessment.

TNLNYC:

do you think the site is attract­ing peo­ple because of the nov­elty and/or con­tro­versy of set­ting up a list? how do you plan to sus­tain the kind of traf­fic over the long run?

blo­gebrity:

yeah, i think there is def­i­nitely some nov­elty fac­tor but i also think its reflec­tive of the matu­rity process of blog­ging. It’s reached a point where some addi­tional taxonomy/structure is valu­able to the com­mu­nity, to bet­ter under­stand the mass of infor­ma­tion avail­able on the blo­gos­phere. And, like it or not, our cul­ture responds/understands this sort of celebrity-style clas­si­fi­ca­tion very well.

blo­gebrity:

but really for us, this is about a group of die-hard blog readers/writers, look­ing to dig deeper, to find new ways to explore the con­ver­sa­tions going on in blog­land… and/or pro­voke some dis­cus­sions too.

TNLNYC:

In the begin­ning days of the com­mer­cial inter­net (right after the Netscape IPO) a sim­i­lar phe­nom­e­non arose about the Inter­net (with new “inter­net celebrity” mag­a­zines pop­ping us on what seemed like a daily basis). After the big shakeup, none of those mag­a­zines sur­vived. Do you think that blo­gebrity will have a lim­ited win­dow of oppor­tu­nity? And what hap­pens when the main­stream pubs start cov­er­ing the blog space more heav­ily (for exam­ple, the NY Times is start­ing to have a reg­u­lar mon­day fea­ture about blogs)? Is that competition?

blo­gebrity:

we eat the NY Times for break­fast! *just kid­ding* No, I def­i­nitely think there are going to be plenty of chal­lengers and I think for us, it’s about stay­ing in touch with what’s going on in the com­mu­nity, and devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships with blog­gers. So we can pro­vide “access” that oth­ers might not nec­es­sar­ily have, as well as analy­sis and under­stand­ing that has greater depth than the main­stream media options. I mean, def­i­nitely one inspi­ra­tion for “blo­gebrity” was just laugh­ing at so much of the big media pre­sen­ta­tion of blogs: It’s like, they don’t really get it, they just know it’s big… and want a piece. We want to be the guys who really get it. Hope­fully, peo­ple feel like we do.

TNLNYC:

and what does “get­ting it” con­sti­tute of?

blo­gebrity:

well, i see SOME peo­ple focus­ing too much on blogs as mini ver­sions of the old media enti­ties that have been around on the Web since its incep­tion. And i see SOME focus­ing heav­ily on the con­ver­sa­tions going on, with­out ana­lyz­ing the con­text effec­tively. And plenty of peo­ple that think it’s just a fad that will go away. Oh… And we see a lot of blog­gers tak­ing them­selves WAY too seri­ously. So there’s a healthy amount of tongue-in-cheekness going on with the “blo­gebrity” title and A-lists and such and we aim to main­tain that through­out. Yes, blogs are the best thing since sliced bread; But no, just because you have one doesn’t mean your Pulitzer prize is in the mail.

TNLNYC:

I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the analy­sis by blogging.la and I was won­der­ing… Is this the begin­ning of another blog net­work? and if yes, how about some words about the com­pe­ti­tion (Jason, Nick, etc…) ?

blo­gebrity:

good ques­tion. Well i’ve started quite a few dif­fer­ent blogs… Not totally sure if we want to dive into start­ing a bunch more in a network-style but it’s def­i­nitely one option we’re pon­der­ing. I am per­son­ally more inter­ested in being some­where in between that and a tech­no­rati or feedster—a hybrid of blog net­work, with real ana­lyt­i­cal tools that sup­ple­ment our content.

TNLNYC:

Gotta run but one last ques­tion: Any words out to Jason or Nick (that is, Kot­tke and Den­ton, since you have them on the mock cov­ers of the magazine)?

blo­gebrity:

ummm.…keep up the great work.….and any­time you want to do an “Exclu­sive” blo­gebrity inter­view, let us know. We’ll send out Pat O’Brien right away.

TNLNYC:

thanks… I’ll post this on my blog soon.. Thanks for tak­ing the time to answer a few ques­tions

blo­gebrity:

no prob­lem… anytime