Buzz Variants

I’ve been tinkering with placing RSS feeds (via the fine mt-rssfeed plugin) on the right side of the front page. The Popdex Top five is there now although I considered both Daypop and Yahoo Buzz feeds. Unfortunately, Daypop looks (and has remained) broken based on looking at their front page and the Yahoo! buzz results seemed to focus on rap stars and female soccer players. Blaaaaaah.

The Popdex buzz is what I consider to be herd buzz meaning that a whole bunch of people essentially voted that a topic was relevant by linking to it. Popdex noted that the herd did so and ranked appropriately.

Many folks have an intense knee jerk reaction to herd buzz (think American Idol) because it’s, well, vanilla. Many individuals really want to be individuals and the thoughts of “going with the norm” is abhorrent to them. Here’s a tip for all you individuals out there, the herd may not be smarted than you, but they have infinitely more time. This means they’re much more likely to identify something as buzz-worthy in their collective billions of hours online while you are there sitting there in your underwear, reloading Technorati to see if anybody, anywhere actually linked to your weblog.

The converse of herd buzz is personal buzz — we all love personal buzz because it’s ours. It’s when we find something or create something that we consider to be buzz worthy. TO HELL WHAT THE HERD THINKS — I THINK THIS IS COOL. The good news is that personal buzz is essential for herd buzz to exist. If no one ever notices/creates something cool, the herd will never know. The bad news is that the chances that your personal buzz has a chance in the unfathomably large herd buzz pool is quite low. Still, you never know, your own personal sick joke might catch on. Good luck.