I recently stumbled across Matt Huggins via his Entrepreneurial Blog. The article that caught my attention was 55 Essential Articles Every Serious Blogger Should Read.
There were two reasons this caught my eye. First, it's a great collection of articles written by a variety of bloggers. Each piece stands on its own and the authors probably never thought their work would be strung together to create a larger (virtual) work like this. After all, wouldn't you normally go to a book for this sort of extensive coverage of so many diverse topics? That leads me to my second point...
How does this model further affect the book publishing landscape of the future? Most people in the publishing industry will tell you they've been affected by Google and the ability for customers to find answers to most questions for free online. Most if not all of the articles Matt links to are likely to come up in a Google search of related terms, but the search results often feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.
What Matt has done here is add a layer of editorial structure and organization to a list of 55 somewhat unrelated articles. That sounds like what a good development editor might do with an author's initial outline, for example. So while you could find all these articles through Google, Matt has picked what he considers to be the best of the best and organized them into logical clusters, like Parts in a book.
I can't help wonder if there's a business model in this somewhere. If a site were to constantly scour the web for the latest articles and feature pages like Matt's for every topic under the sun you'd think they could drive enough traffic to build a solid advertising model around. It also sounds like a great community model, just like Wikipedia; rather than subject matter experts writing lengthy entries for a topic, they just build these lists, keeping them organized and updated for all the latest developments.
Interesting post, Joe. I think if you can start to get a few initial links from some renowned sources, then you might be well on your way to making such a business model work.
I put this list together at the very beginning of June, but it wasn't until the last day of the month that a fairly big blog linked to it. Since then, I've been linked to by probably 100+ blogs, I've been on the del.icio.us homepage, and much more just from that initial link.
In turn, I've received 3x the amount of AdSense earnings as I earned in June, but only in 9 days time. (I also experienced a huge leap in RSS subscribers.)
With this info in mind, I definitely think there is some basis to what you consider here. Good post. :)
Posted by: Matt Huggins | July 11, 2007 at 03:31 AM