Steve Boyd on RSS “breaking through”

Don Dodge — who is on a tear recently — posts about The new way to launch your product or company:

It doesn’t cost anything to publicize your new product or service. Simply engage a couple of the “A-List” bloggers (Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Richard MacManus, Stowe Boyd, and others) by sending them a link to your new product or service. Tell them what problem it solves and why it is cool. When they blog, people listen. When their stories hit Tech Memeorandum, Digg, TailRank, and other services the story explodes across thousands of blogs within hours.

Nice group to be included in.

In effect Don is suggesting that these uber-bloggers are becoming gatekeepers, and as they discover something neat, or innovative, or fun, and then blog it, gazillions of others follow.

The power law at work again.

And of course companies are not blind to this. That’s why I am getting five or more emails/calls from companies in the process of launching new products, every week.

And I am certain that PR firms all over are honing their “blogger relations” skills, as these uber-bloggers begin to fill the role that “analysts” from Gartner, Forrester, and other analyst firms used to fill, and to some extent still do. Except now it’s specific analysts who have proven their mettle, and not just because of the Gartner brand.

As I wrote a few weeks ago …

[from Who Are The New Gatekeepers?]

It’s a dynamic system, where individual authority — good writing on a topic — leads to emergent authority (as many swarm to read a great post), which allows Technorati to mine those readers’ links, which leads to increased individual authority, and so on. Meanwhile, individuals combine into groups — like the Web 2.0 Workgroup — which confers an almost institutional authority, or are included on exclusive lists in aggregation, like the tech.memeorandum 2000 bloggers.

So, the answer is: there is no gate. There are many waypoints, many street signs, and many ways to go, but no one is barring the gate, or deciding who is let in. This is confusing if we try to apply the old map to the new territory, but not if we try to perceive the new media universe as it is.

But even though things are fluid, and constantly changing, and even though there are a million niches out there, companies will try to simplify the system for their advantage. When they are getting ready to launch new products, the entrepreneurs want there to be gatekeepers, so they can talk to 20 or 30 people instead of millions.

So uber-bloggers are filling an economic and social need, based on the trust and authority that they have developed, and acting as a filter for others. And the entrepreneurs, on one side, and the greater reading blogosphere, on the other, are keeping the lens focused on a short list of a few hundred tech bloggers, whose influence is spiking.

The odd things is how the prior arbiters of tech viability have fallen, and how little they have done in the blogosphere. You expect that Gartner, Forrester and so on would have created hundreds of successful, influential bloggers, rather than just a handful. It could be that the writing and analytic styles of the two worlds don’t jibe, but that seems wrong to me. Perhaps the pay-for-advice model of the analyst firms, or their use of the imperial “we” in their analysis, just don’t make the transition to the blogosphere very well.