Steve Rubel Micro Persuades:
Deep underneath the blogosphere lies a network that’s just as big and powerful. It has a lots of participants, yet it’s completely invisible to those who do not blog. It’s the Underground Blogosphere. The Underground Blogosphere is an intricate web of hundreds of thousands of emails that bloggers send to each other every day. In essence, they are “pitching” their latest posts in hopes of getting a link. Sometimes, bloggers are genuinely looking for good feedback, but more often than not all they are just looking for traffic. There’s a lot of irony in the Underground Blogosphere! For starters, I get more email pitches from bloggers whom I have never met than I do from PR professionals. Many of these same bloggers probably hate PR pitches, yet they’re happy to dish it out themselves.
Rubel occupies a prominent spot in the PR/tech/business blogosphere, which doesn’t overlap much with the political blogosphere. But the phenomenon he describes is just as prevalent on this side of the tracks (and I don’t just mean the controversial Townhouse list). The Blogometer attracted many emails from self-promoting bloggers, and by and large I appreciated them, though like Rubell, I wouldn’t reward everybody who just happened to think of me (or more accurately, the traffic I might send them). But close watchers could tell when I would too often quote a blogger out of proportion with how their readership or influence. And they probably could guess why.
On the other hand, there was one unnamed A-List blogger who, one week, started emailing me notification of every single post. Things you could tell he’d found on the Drudge Report only minutes earlier. I take some pride in being a courteous emailer, but before long I snapped: “Look, I read Drudge, too.” Regaining composure, I explained myself better in a follow-up, but after he apologized, the emails didn’t slow down. They stopped immediately, and I never heard from him again.
I would imagine the vast majority of such exchanges are friendly ones — unsurprisingly, people talk to their allies more often than their enemies — but you never know when someone will expose a small part of it to the sunlight. It’s always at least a little bit scandalous when this happens without permission, even if names are changed and there is no intent to harm. The Underground Blogosphere wants to stay underground for a reason.
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