Suw Charman has whuffie

Suw Charman commented a couple of weeks ago that not everyone has enough "whuffie" to start a snowball rolling down a hill ala Doc Searls.

The great thing about the blogosphere, though, is that one can acquire whuffie by rubbing up against someone, like Doc, who has megawhuffie, to start your own snowball a-rolling. Write a post about your own snowball, find a way to get Doc or Robert Scoble or Steve Rubel or BoingBoing to link to it, and watch the whuffie whuff. The great thing about the biggest bloggers is that they aren't selfish with their whuffie. They spread it far and wide and the good ideas catch on. You already know this if you've ever had the fortune of being linked to by one of the above guys and gals. Your traffic spikes. Now, whether or not your idea takes off after that spike depends on the quality of the idea.

But here's another thing - whenever people tell me "oh I don't want to blog, no-one will read it", I try to point out that they are missing the point IMHO. Write about what you know. It doesn't matter if you don't turn into an overnight A-list blogger. GOOGLE WILL FIND YOU. If you write a thoughtful post on belly-button fluff and, a year from now, someone is searching for information on belly-button fluff, they will probably find your post. AND YOUR WORK IS DONE. (By the way, a week from now this post will probably be the #1 google result for "belly-button fluff"... so come up with something else.)

I think of it like this - we all have knowledge about stuff we are passionate about. Keeping that knowledge inside your own little skull-tomb is about the most selfish thing you can do. Let it out. Give it life. Blog it. Maybe no-one will read it, but maybe someone will. And maybe that person will build on it and someone will build on their work and on and on until... you started a snowball.

Comments

[Richard Giles]

I think Suw misunderstands what Whuffie is. Whuffie is more the good that someone does. Like a self sacrifice. Suw seems to assume it is purely reputation, but it's more about the way the reputation is built than how much reputation you have.

[Rob Irwin]

Another way of looking at it is that getting up and dashing off 50-100 words on something is a great way to get your creative juices flowing. It's a superb mental excercise... and the fact that the thoughts end up 'out there' for, essentially, as long as you maintain your site (and even longer, in terms of something like Google's cache and other projects which 'record' the Web), is icing on the cake.

[Steve]

I totally agree with your response to the "oh I don't want to blog, no-one will read it" situation! I was of this mind until one day I started to look through some stats for a few friend's blog sites, noting the vast number of Google keywords/phrases that matched real content on the blogs...

I suddenly realised that even though I might not know anyone interested in reading inane "what I did today" facts on a weblog, it becomes relevant to the (potentially) thousands of searchers from around the world looking for an elusive fact or snippet of wisdom to help them along...

I convinced myself that a blog would be a great medium to share information - and it's been working - I'm in the 4th month of keeping my blog and I've been nearly doubling my unique visitors AND search engine hits each month.