People Watching in the Blogosphere

Rebecca Kelley’s right; we do all blog for attention. Damn attention trollops, we all are.

If I’ve learned anything from the immediate, wide-spread adoption of MyBlogLog, and the emergence of sites like Technorati’s disappearing WTF site and the currently-in-beta Serph, it’s that everyone wants to know who’s talking about them and whose visiting their blog. We can’t even wait a day to find out; we have to know RIGHT NOW.

Let me ask you: How many times have you refreshed your MyBlogLog profile today? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that but it’s clear a lot of us having been using the conversation to gauge our success. We once just resorted to googling ourselves every few days, but now we can’t even wait long enough for them to update their results.

Andrew Girdwood had an interesting post today. He blogged that his New Year’s Resolution for 2007 was to do something with his blog. He comments that in January alone he has already blogged more than he did in 2006’s entirety. For me, that signals he’s been successful, but that’s not what he seems to be using to determine if he’s reached his goal or not. That’s apparently been charted out for him by his star-packed MyBlogLog Reader Roll which shows the faces of search wizards like Michael Gray, Kim Krause, Bill Slawski, and others. He rates his blog’s success by the collective celebrity of his readership.

I don’t know if I agree with that (I think his blog success is what got the famous faces there, not the other way around) but I think it’s interesting. I admit. Last week Chris Hooley suggested I hop on the MyBlogLog bandwagon and I have been hooked ever since. I love it because I can see who’s checking us out, but I hate it for the exact same reason – you can see I’m checking you out. How am I supposed to stalk my favorite search folk if they can see it every time I visit their profile? Counterproductive, I say. It’s completely different than hitting your local coffee shop and eavesdropping on the amusing conversations and bad fashion choices of others. Those people can’t see you.

And why does the emergence of ShoeMoney’s name on my profile page make me break into a sweat? Because I’m a search dork who cares (but is also frightened) that you’re interested in us. At the end of the day I suppose I’ve held on to that junior high mentality of just wanting you all to like me and not believing that you actually might. (Go ahead, you can "aw".) [Oh brother. –Susan]

That’s also why I signed up to tryout the beta version of Serph which if you missed Search Engine Journal’s write-up yesterday, is like Technorati on crack. It reports up-to-the-minute what people are saying about you. I tried it out yesterday while the whole Andy Beal/Jeremy Zawodny firestorm was going on (glad to see you crazy kids worked it out!) and Serph was right there telling me who said what to whom right as it happened. Pretty cool stuff.

I think these sites are all great for people watching. It’s fascinating to me all the faces that have dropped by to check out my MyBlogLog profile. I hope you keep coming back to say hi, and more importantly, I hope you remember to add the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog to your community list (please?). We’re thrilled, shocked and humbled to have every one of you here, and we’ve really enjoyed watching our real community (as opposed to the MyBlogLog one) grow as we’ve opened up blog comments.

However, I’m going to be careful to not let myself use our Reader Roll or the frequency of my name in Technorati searches affect how I view the success of our blog. I think ultimately the success of this blog will be dependant on the same measure that Bruce Clay as a company always has been, on the quality of our content and the uniqueness of our search engine optimization services. It’s okay. You can aw. ;)

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.