To be perfectly honest Alex, a lot of the SBI sites I've looked at seem to be a collection of material written by other people, collected together in one place and then flogged to others with SEO techniques. That is certainly not true of all of them—I'm really enjoying Rebecca's Lucid Dreaming site, for example—but it holds up as a generalization. Not to many of them are sites I'd want to spend a lot of time at. Compared to Steve's blogging style—generating tons of original content—simply marketing the heck out of a digest of weak, unoriginal material seems like a pretty thin business model. I'm not saying that my site is going to remake the blogging world and be the next Boing Boing, but I do think that thoughtfully created, original content will hold up better over time and always find an audience. And the size of that audience will be related to the quality of the material. In short, a lot of SBI sites seem more about marketing than creating and delivering value.
Just some thoughts.
cheers,
Angus
|