Back at the beginning of April Susan Mernit wrote a blog post (ya I’m coming to this late but I only just found it) where she tossed out a few thoughts about a Louis Gray (there’s that name again) post about the Techmeme Leaderboard and the stats around them.

In her post Susan said she would have liked to seen his thoughts on the growth - or shrinkage - of solo bloggers:

The interest there would be to see how the solo blogger’s focus and reach fares as the blog networks get stronger–as online media increasingly fragments, it’s as interesting to watch the people in the middle as the ones at the top–at a certain point, the behaviors around who’s at the top–and how they scale up–become increasingly predictable. It would be neat to note, however, if that second and third tier get more traffic and reach–or less-because of their association with the big guy’s stories.

The fact is that I don’t think we will see another Scoble-like success story when it comes to the current crop of mid-level and up and coming solo bloggers. I believe that because of the second thing that Susan wondered about:

Looking at VentureBeat’s rise in the Techmeme stats as they’re fueled by investment dollars suggests a resources=traffic correlation that is worth checking further.

I’d also like to know how much of the big blogging networks traffic is being bought and how much is truly viral or organic. Are TechCrunch, GigaOm, and others seeding their traffic with SEM search terms? And if not, are the big media players going that route? Techmeme doesn’t account for marketing, only linking, and yet reader acquisition is always a factor that has to be in play.

One only has to hang around the latest social media darlings like Twitter and FriendFeed to see how the power of the blog networks and multi-author blogs is built upon as they play the popularity game. It never fails that when a new post is made to the likes of Mashable or ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch you can see the authors reaching out to their fans and encourage them to pump the post. Most often you will see references to Digg or you will see a stream of posts being added to shared Google Reader feed.

The big boys have learned how to play this popularity game very well and they use it to propel themselves forward and dominate most of the conversations taking place throughout the tech blogosphere. There are exceptions to this - such as Louis Gray or Frederic from The Last Podcast and really I wouldn’t be surprised if either of those two weren’t snapped up at some point by one of the big blog networks. In fact I would suggest that the big boys would be stupid if they weren’t seriously looking at bloggers like Louis and Frederic.

But at that point they are no longer solo - they will have become associated with their now employer. Such is the case with ParisLemon - or as he is better known now on VentureBeat - MG Siegler. While he does a good job at maintaining his own brand blog; and as I would expect Louis or Frederic to do the same, VentureBeat is the one being moved forward by his writing.

Solo bloggers on the other hand don’t have the same drawing power in the popularity game and have to rely on their own brand to move them forward. With bloggers from the early days of blogging like Robert Scoble, Dave Winer or Stowe Boyd it was easy to build up their popularity as there was no real competition for readers. Now everyone is in a sense competing for readership and today’s solo bloggers don’t have the same abilities to draw on the power of readership to increase their popularity or rankings.

While some solo bloggers may do well I don’t think that we will see any reach the popularity level of those early bloggers. The drawing power and ability to manipulate the popularity game of the big blog networks is now just too entrenched. In most cases bloggers who even approach that kind of popularity will either be made some very good offers by existing blog networks or offered to join new ones that are built around them.

That doesn’t mean that solo bloggers will be any less important. In fact I think that in a lot of cases they will become even more important than they are now in order to keep true journalistic balance to the game. I just don’t think they will ever approach Scoble-like fame.

Conversation Tags: blogs, blog networks, popularity, independent