Andy Warhol's concept of "15 minutes of fame" is a bit deceiving for bloggers. Doesn't a good blog post deserve a lifetime of attention on the ‘net?
C'mon, Andy Warhol never could have imagined how the Internet would chop away at our 15 minutes of fame.Painting: Andy Warhol. Illustrated by Brian Lewis-Jones
Even though a solid, original post technically lives forever, the sense of celebrity brought with a blog can prove fleeting. If a blog posted under a clever pseudonym gets 1000 Diggs, the blogger could be disappointed when the story gets quickly cycled through the site.
Internet-skimmers might glance at the post and steer away in a about a minute. Is this what Andy Warhol meant by 15 minutes of fame? (Perhaps a 15-minute YouTube video better fits the ticket).
Even through "standard," non-Internet media attention, this brief moment of popularity still doesn't live with a person forever. Memories come as quickly as they go – unless you're an ancient Egyptian, Greek, U.S. president or The Beatles, your chances of getting remembered for eons for merely making the blogging "A-list" remains slim.
But for the present moment – bloggers have to catch a niche and fill it to the brim with candy tasty posts if they want to get known. And unless the blogger keeps feeding the beast, the beast gets bored and munches on something else. This seems especially true in an ADD-prone Internet-clicking generation.
So, take AppleInsider for example: the bloggy news site is constantly updated with Apple technology leaks. As long as secrets of up-and-coming technology get posted to the site, users will keep returning. For up-and-coming blogs, initial popularity is harder to achieve, especially since fewer blog niches remain available every day.
Perhaps it'll take old-school advertising like leaflets and shouting on the street for new blogs to make it. Online ads and links to bigger blogs certainly bring more traffic to the kitchen table, but without an initial popularity boost, a web journal, perhaps one similar to my own, is just another Internet filler. What is good content if nobody gets to it?
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