I suppose Technorati is mainly concerned with the metrics and search side of all things Blogosphere. Technorati helps people find information, rather then helping them create blog content or get their voices heard in Blogosphere conversations.
Still, In the second part of his ‘State of the Blogosphere’ (part 1 here), Technorati’s founder and CEO David Sifry briefly touches upon the challenges that individual bloggers may have in attracting attention. What he offers, really, is nothing less than… hope 
He basically pep-talks people into blogging, offering the perspective of becoming part of ‘The Magic Middle’. That’s Technorati speak for the realm of 155,000 bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. By publishing regularly and with consistent quality, this is an achievable goal for many bloggers, David seems to suggest.
Well, it feels like a bit of a Catch 22, doesn’t it? The Magic Middle makes up about 1.1 percent of those 13.7 million blogs that we could call "alive" (since 13.5 million blogs out of the total 27.2 blogs that Technorati tracks have been dead for at least three months).
Something tells me that, if enough average bloggers reach the 20-links benchmark, it will be lifted in order to keep the Magic Middle at around one percent of the blog population.
Still, David gives us two straws to clutch at. First, there is a particular quality to The Magic Middle:
"(…) "The Magic Middle" of the attention curve,
highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and
publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or
niche, like Chocolate and Zucchini on food, Wi-fi Net News on Wireless networking, TechCrunch on Internet Companies, Blogging Baby on parenting, Yarn Harlot on knitting, or Stereogum on music
- these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and
in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing. (…)"
Translation: it’s worth trying to get there.
The second argument is that, although – yes – network effects and a power law relationship do exist in the Blogosphere, the importance of these mechanisms should not be overestimated:
"(…) There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content. (…)"
"(…) [T]he number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak. (…)"
Funny thing is, as it happens, I’m not so worried about the amount of attention to my blog. I’m more concerned with the quality of the attention. The way the Blogosphere should really work is that, if your blog entry adds value to a particular conversation, it should surface in that conversation. So it’s not about your position on the head or the tail; it’s about whether the Long Tail works as it is supposed to.
If your contribution adds value to the conversation and, as a result, the whole conversation moves a little further up the tail and towards the head, then that may be a nice by-product. But for many niche conversations, even this will not be the most pressing objective.
The most promising technology is technology that helps The Long Tail function.
Technorati Tags: Technorati, David Sifry, Long Tail, Magic Middle, Blogosphere, authority
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One more thing that struck me when reading David Sifry‘s