Obsession Times Voice

‘Topic Times Voice’, or, if you’re a little bit more of a ‘Obsession Times Voice’.

Notable bloggers John Gruber andMerlin Mann expounded on this theory in a presentation they gave at this year’s SxSW conference in Austin, Texas.

Their presentation was broadly about blogging as micro self-publishing. Their principle theme was the importance of owning your topic. To expand Merlin’s quote above. Without obsession your blog will tend to wander. Without their own individual voices all too many blogs fall back on repeating other content from web.

His argument is that if you have obsession without voice, then all you basically have is a keyword search. You have reblogging without curation. Conversely if you have voice without an obsession then you get the equivalent of the more pointless content people post on Twitter (what they had for lunch).

Mann and Gruber both stress the importance for bloggers of figuring out where you are, whatever it is that you want do and whatever outcome is the most important to you. They see the platform of personal publishing via blogging as the lever to become really great, becoming “the go-to person for whatever topic you are obsessed with”.

They argue that you need to set yourself ambitious goals, aiming to be in the top twenty percentile. “Whatever your topic is, try to figure how to be better at it than 80% of everybody else in the world. I think that’s very ambitious, and you know what, you probably won’t be. Right?”

You can download the complete audio recording of their presentation here.

Mann on Obligations and Your Blog’s Community

This episode of ‘The Sound Of Young America’ podcast was recorded live at the Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta at a session with the slightly disconcerting title of ‘Blow Up Your Brand.’ It is a round-table discussion covering a range of online activities. The content that is relevant to this research begins at about 37 minutes when contrarian blogger Merlin Mann talks about his experiences dealing with the community that builds up around a high-profile blog. He makes a number of admirable points.
“If you put out great work that says a lot more about you than a press release.” [28.29]

“Creating community is not as simple as turning on comments.” [37.40]

“Any time you turn on a community aspect it not only needs moderation of some kind, but you are obligated to listen, respond and then show how that input had an effect on what you do. And if you do that I think it is very cynical.” [38.10]

“If you encourage community and social media around what you do, you need to be prepared for the day that it goes in a direction that you never expected and becomes wildly successful in a way that you are completely unprepared for. And your PR people are going to have a stroke when they see all the @ responses on Twitter. People giving a very unvarnished public opinion that you asked for.” [43.22]

“Know where you stand on that and understand that, at a certain point on the web, you give away a lot of control when you accept somebody else carrying your freight.” [43.48]

TSOYA Podcast, 27 March 2009

The Sound of Young America