Famous in one year, a has-been in two
Looking through the interesting “Fifty Most Influential Bloggers” reminded me of an old Internet magazine from 2000 I was flicking through the other day before I threw it out. It had the “top 50″ most influential people in the UK’s Internet industry. Looking through the names and faces, I didn’t see anyone you’d consider influential in the UK Internet scene nowadays, and looking through the fifty bloggers I saw quite a lot of people whose blog launches I remembered from only the past couple of years.
I’ve been blogging since September 1999 with a year’s break for the whole of 2007, but have certainly not achieved, or really strived for, any fame. I am not going to be in the “most influential” anything. One thing I’ve probably picked up from it all, though, is some wisdom of how things change yet stay the same. It’s totally possible, with enough drive and focus, to get yourself into the top 100 blogs within a year, but it’s likewise possible to come crashing back down again within a few years even if you keep striving.
My other blog, Ruby Inside, has done quite well. It’s coming up to two years’ old this year, and has 12640 subscribers as of today. It’s definitely the #1 most popular weblog in the Ruby (and most likely Rails) niche, but that’s a pretty small and easy niche to dominate. However, I know that it wouldn’t be impossible for some plucky young thing to attempt to topple Ruby Inside from its pedestal, and I’m keeping my eyes open to it. It’s not something to fight, necessarily, but competitors always provide you with good reasons to innovate.
So where am I going with all of this? Well, I don’t want to be a “top 100″ blogger, but it’d definitely be nice to get into a larger niche than Ruby and make a success of it. Brian Clark of Copy Blogger and Darren Rowse of Problogger are both personal heroes of mine, and absolutely dominate in their larger niches. It’d be awfully nice to get to their level in a niche that can actually make money because Ruby sure isn’t one!
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