SEOmoz | Could Twitter Cannibalize the Web's Link Graph
In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn't uncommon for a few hundred small & mid-size blogs & news sites to pick up a story, add their thoughts and create links. Today, even very popular pieces of content in the technology sphere are lucky to have two dozen blogs and traditional websites write about them. What's happened? Darren and I proposed a few potential theories:
- Blogging has become less about sharing with your network and more about building up your own importance/business, so linking and covering the works of your peers, unless it gets you something, has limited viability. Bloggers are more professional, more self-focused and find less value in linking to/covering what others produce.
- Blogging, at least in the "bleeding edge" technology fields (social media, SEO, webdev, etc.) is not as popular as it once was. While this might be a hard argument to make, there's certainly some circumstanstial evidence - just look at my list of SEO blogs from 2006 and 2007 - there is an undeniably smaller amount of content being produced by many of these folks.
- Twitter is cannibalizing blogging. People who previously might have blogged about a site/news article/clever piece of linkbait are simply tweeting it, and save their blog posts for more comprehensive essays and broader subjects.
via seomoz.org
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