Just found out and read a post on 9Rules about the Long Tail of Niche Content that 9Rules produces; there’s some interesting concepts in this post.

"On the Web there are millions of choices for content, and the people who consume this content don’t care if it’s coming from a 14-year old in Germany or The Pope himself, as long as 1) it’s interesting to them, and 2) it’s of a high quality. Look at how much time people spend browsing through YouTube videos or reading MySpace profiles compared to how many hours of TV they watch or how many newspapers they read, that’s the sign right there that in this near-infinite supply of content readily available, consumers will find the content they like the best and not what other people *tell them* is the best. This Long Tail of content consumption on the Net is where blogs fit in perfectly, because no matter how obscure your content subject or niche, there will always be an audience looking for your content.

The problem is making yourself known to that audience."

Correct. 

"most of the Technorati 100 are on there because of external factors that have nothing to do with their content. Scoble worked at Microsoft for awhile which gave him certain notoriety, Boing Boing has been around forever and is edited by veritable Internet superstars, TechCrunch rose to popularity because Michael was intimately involved in the startup scene before he started blogging and brought his connections with him, The Huffington Post is run by Arianna Huffington and she’s famous, Seth Godin’s blog is there because Seth is a well-known author and speaker, and so on. If you look at nearly all blogs on the Technorati 100, it’s difficult to say they made it there solely on the quality of their content and not because of any external factors. These external factors (marketing, word of mouth, author fame, notoriety, etc.) do not guarantee quality content, but in the world of popularity I’d say that author fame trumps quality every single time, and that’s my point. So many new blogs are trying to emulate their heroes on the T-Rati 100 when they should actually forget about that and just develop their content and form their own niche, because the audience is already there waiting for them."

And that’s what we’re trying to at Know More Media and I know that’s also what I’m doing with ArtNYC on the Syntagma Media content publishing solution.

And one point I made to an artist friend recently, the number of RSS Subscribers and/or email newsletter subscribers you grow on your blogs are a better indicator of success than pageviews or visits (perhaps AdSense revenues also need to be considered) - this is something Seth Godin recently pointed out and which I wrote about the other day.

"Which brings us back to subscription. The only win I see in the long run is for the winner of today’s attention lottery to earn a subscription (an RSS feed or an email sign up or a podcast subscription) that gives them a chance to be noticed tomorrow as well. Depending on the magic of shuffle for your success is too painful and too unpredictable."

I have been telling people who have blogs, esp popular ones, is to write more - and make sure to write about the images your posting about - think in terms of keywords and when your a painter - think in terms of naming some of your works (just one or two) after a well known painting, as I did, not on purpose, when I painted After The Bath and found out that I was getting visits every day now to Webmetricsguru because of it - Power of Google’s Image Search on Search Traffic.   But that’s all part of the Long Tail - do enough of that and you’ll get packets of "niche traffic" that suppliment your main posting.   My goal is to post on so many things that are important to me that I will create a Very Long Tail of content that will bring small pockets of niche traffic to Webmetricsguru (and to all my blogs, including ArtNYC and to a certain extent, SmartMobs - which is really not my blog, it’s Howard Rheingold’s but I do post to it a couple of times a week).