Many things attracted me to WordPress. Many things I discovered when I got here have kept me here. One of the things I discovered when I got here was the “Top WordPress.com Blogs of Today” that is displayed on the dashboard. It gave everyone the chance to be “featured”. I feel this is now a thing of the past.
The top blogs of the day feature is great and it used to be better. It used to be that anyone with a blog hosted on WordPress had the chance of being featured right there on the “homepage” when you logged into WordPress. I was excited about the fact that anyone could end up there and you did not have to be an “A-List” blogger. I am interested in what people have to say, especially that which is well written or of note. Now the list of the top four blogs on WordPress.com are usually VIP Blogs that are popular because of who they are.
[Note: Non WordPress.com readers can see the top blogs for today on WordPress here.]
Scoble and his blog Scobleizer has been hosted on WordPress for some time. When
I joined it was always on the top, everyday. It doesn’t matter what he wrote it was on top. But, every now and then one of us not so well known bloggers piped Scoble off the top dog spot. These were the posts that really got me interested, mainly because it was because the content was worth looking at. It got my attention. So what has changed?
In late September WordPress started to off a new service for VIP bloggers. For $500 setup and $250 per month the WordPress team will set up a blog, maintain it and you get some nice VIP features. You become a VIP blog on WordPress. This is attractive for companies and “A-List bloggers” that make their income from blogging. They need a reliable service, with WordPress they get that. WordPress is a great service and offers great reliability and stability along with expertise that keep everything going and always rolling out new features. It can also handle the bandwidth required if a post ends up on Digg or Slashdot. So how does that affect me?
Now that we have VIP bloggers on WordPress like Anousheh Ansari’s “Space Blog”, Om Malik’s Web Worker Daily and more recently the Official Linden Blog, they are the Second Life people, they are always featured on the top blogs of the day. The sheer popularity and reach of these players now make the possibility of anything that I write have zero possibility of getting on the top blogs list.
I do not resent the fact that WordPress is inviting VIP’s to blog on WordPress, it makes very good business sense and I appreciate that it gives them exposure and respect within the blogosphere. But I don’t want to see a top blog list of bloggers that I could go to Techmeme and see! I want to see the “average Joe” have the opportunity to be listed as a “Top Blog”. I could not care if I never got on the list again, but I would like to think that there was always the opportunity that I could be. At this present time I have zero to none chances of making the cut. In addition this list should be dynamic and change all the time. At the moment it is like “Ground Hog Day”! Same blogs there day after day with no change, or very little. So what do I think should be done?
I think that the answer might be for the great guys at WordPress to make another list on the dashboard. Sure keep the “Top WordPress.com Blogs of today”, make that for everyone, who knows we might be able to get the traffic required to get on the list with the “A-listers”. Have another list that is formulated by taking out the “A-List” blog factor. That is; a list for the rest of us. At least then it would feel fair and not impossible to be a “Top WordPress.com Blog”.
How do other WordPress.com users feel about this idea? Is it something that you think you would appreciate? If so let the WordPress guys know and maybe we will see it. I do not think that it would be that hard to do. So how about it?
Rooster's Rail 
October 11, 2006 at 6:47 pm
[…] I’m a narcissistic boring blogger. At least that’s what LayZ tells me. But, even I have to admit that David Gray is right and that I’m bored with being at the top of the WordPress.com blog list everyday. […]
October 11, 2006 at 7:09 pm
I totally agree with you. Our blog has made it to the top 10 only once. But it was a good feeling to be there on top even though it was for a few minutes LOL . I find a lot of interesting blogs by going to the Top blogs of the day. I think we need to have a separate category other than the top blogs. where the average user can make it to the frontpage and earn his 5 minutes of fame :).
October 11, 2006 at 11:31 pm
But they did improve it. You’re post is about a week late. 😦
Now instead of showing the top 5, they show a random sampling of the top 100. As long as you are somewhere in the top 100, someone has seen your name when they’ve looked that the wordpress.com main page.
Here’s the forum where people were bitching about it that lead to the change.
October 11, 2006 at 11:52 pm
I knew all about that change, but has your dashboard changed? Mine has not changed in three days. The other thing is that of the top 100 how many do you think might be VIP’s? I think you would be suprised.
Thanks for the link to the forum, I’ll check it out.
October 12, 2006 at 12:40 am
I see your point. The change was only made to wordpress.com (easily checked by refreshing the page) not to the WP Dashboard.
October 12, 2006 at 2:01 am
[…] WordPress.com hosts a great community, and they have several excellent ways of self-promoting each other. They also have a VIP bloggers program that gets big name, high popularity bloggers to use this site. But as they introduce VIP bloggers the non-VIPs can get pushed to the wayside. David Gray recently covered this in a post that got picked up by blogging VIP Robert Scoble. […]
October 12, 2006 at 2:05 am
Hi Dave,
I’ve been thinking about this some more. And I think this is the solution.
October 12, 2006 at 4:18 am
The paradox of mainstream media.
One of the great things that have always attracted me in both blogging and podcasting was the fact that the means to make the cut where the same for everyone. In the beginning you would need an publisher to get your message in the paper , get a book out or whatever. You used to need a radio station to get your voice heard and you would have to sleep with the producer to get on the tube.
All of that has changed thanks to the power of the internet . Now think about it : Everybody could be somebody. Everybody had an article , everybody has a voice and everybody has equal access to the masses.
But the maturity of the internet has taken its tole. Even in cyberspace we are becoming aware of what can only be called “mainstream media”. In our little microcosmos we have our own celebrities. Rest asured : mentioning their names to the average joe on the street will probably get you a “huh?-and-a-shrugg” but to us cybernauts ringing names like Scoble, Dvorak, Curry, Lewis and others are as common as apple pie in Alabama.
Somehow sites like Digg, delicious and others that are the “lords of the lemmings” drive the droves of socially bookmarked surfers towards these mainstream lanes of Top-bloggers, Celebrity podcasters and unintentional amateur pornstars (hello Ms Hilton). So somehow I wonder if the single voice of the average Joe can still be heard.
And what about the average Joe ? An interesting discussion lately presented me with the following dilemma. Would you bend your words, twist your tongue and flex your ideas in order to be popular ? Or would you rather speak from the core of your soul to ten people who appreciate what you are doing.
I (for one) have made up my mind. With an itti titty podcast reaching some 150 people a week. My blog gets hit about 80 times a day. And you know what ? I don’t mind. Once in a while one of my regular listeners or readers drops me a comment, taps me on the shoulder or even walks up to me at work and says : Great post ! I love that . I appreciate the small crowd more then the large amount of people that will probably never really care what I say , but just hit my blog cause “everybody does” or cause it was at the top of some list.
But in fear of being branded as “Sulking blogger with digg-rank-envy” let me reply that one of the greatest pleasures of writing is not being read, but to write. One of the joys in podcasting is to create from the core of my soul and not molding my content to appeal to the masses. I wouldn’t mind 50 000 people to FIND my site , I would just feel weird having to write for all of them on a daily base. Somehow all these eyes or ears would change the acoustics of creativity. Would I create just like that , or change my content in order to remain popular ?
So let my tree fall in the forest , I don’t really care if somebody hears it or not. The joy is in making unique stuff that is read by unique individuals. If somewhere around the world ONE person smiles when reading this .. i’m satisfied. Because the reward of creativity is the creation itself.
October 12, 2006 at 12:21 pm
By the way dude you got scobolized did it make any difference to your stats ;). http://blaugh.com/2006/08/24/whats-a-scoble/
October 12, 2006 at 8:13 pm
Ok here are some rooster on rail picture :D. Just added the http. I didn’t want the comment to enter your spam box.
robertrivkin.com/radmin/files/139view1.gif
farmwest.com/images/photogallery/pictures/IM000416.JPG
astarisearned.smugmug.com/photos/32088105-M.jpg
October 12, 2006 at 11:21 pm
So I went and got a community voting site created. Let’s see what happens.
October 14, 2006 at 9:25 am
They really did not think things thru what they should have done was roll out another
brand and domain so that, wordpress has created another channel?
Not a class system in blogging! The reality is if the product is free u believe the quality
is not their, If you pay a high price the preception is that it is the best damm product on the market. If i charge $500 for search engine ranking and design, It seams i will be talking to the admin assit… in the fortune 500, Now if I charge $85,000 dollars for three monthes of my seo consulting I will be talking to a VP… because my service has been defined exspensive and exclusive! and anything else your preception believes…
maybe they will give them a special number to sign up.. 1-800-Word Press…
October 14, 2006 at 3:14 pm
I’ve honestly been very surprised how easy it has been to make it to the top 100 wordpress.com blogs. There are 144,000 blogs (if I remember correctly) and yet I was able to make it to the top 100 in less than a month. One day I even made it to the top 10. I was surprised.
However, when we talk about the top 5 I agree that it is really out of reach. Also, who really cares to see the Second Life blog and its posts on WordPress.com’s favorite posts? Anytime I see one of them I’m bored out of my mind. If you don’t participate in Second Life most of their posts don’t even make sense. At least Scoble’s posts were intelligible to all people that read them regardless of if they were tech or not.
November 12, 2007 at 7:05 pm
When something goes commercial, it’s not going to be “fair” anymore. Some VIP blog may take over the top spots like eBay featured listing, then hell, the looser are the poor blogger, and the winners are WordPress.com and the people who can actually get profit from paying for VIP account. Regards, Binh Nguyen