90% of Everything is Crap—Sturgeon’s Law

By jamesmAdvertising

Let’s be completely honest for a few minutes—there is a plentiful amount of crap easily found within and around the blogosphere. I know it, and you know it. Perhaps it is the fact that we are hammered with such a great amount of poor quality material that there is such a grand desire for people to find quality content and bloggers. It is a very interesting dicussion.

Sturgeon’s Law (Applied To The Blogosphere)

Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is crap, but I think that number is overly optimistic when considering the blogosphere’s status. As a matter of fact, I think it is more likely to be at least 95% or more. However, I will still, reluctantly, give the benefit of the doubt to Sturgeon’s Law. I hope that the blogosphere does not take this as an insult, but if you are reading this blog, then you are well on your way to avoid becoming the typical noise within the blogosphere—I am here to turn that noise into a beautifully constructed harmonic.

I have no factual data on hand relating to how many new blogs there are being added to the blogosphere on a daily basis, but I’m willing to bet that it is at least in the upper hundreds; but those numbers could easily surpass thousands. And with these new blogs, a variety of voices arrive as well, but still, most of them are just going to be adding to the already existing crap.

As we all hear about how so many more blogs are being added to the blogosphere, I am not bothered by that information, and neither should you. Some of you might see it as a blessing.

Opportunity Awaits

Fortunately, all this leaves a solid opportunity for you, the blogger that is trying to make a name for yourself, to put forth hard work to stand out from the rest of the crap which everyone has to filter through.

Ironically enough, perhaps it is the fact that there is so much crap out there that gives us the opportunity to break away from the rest of the blogosphere and become well noticed for our own endeavors.

After all, there are actually people who are paid to simply find great content on the web from blogs. Sites like TechMeMe, Digg, and Reddit all exist to promote quality content on the web, and they are valuable hubs to promote your best content. If you are a relatively new blogger (or your blog is just starting off), you still must reach out to the blogosphere to draw people in, but once they get there, people will realize the true value of your content, and they might even do the work of spreading the word for you.

Therefore, simple logic should kick in—the more crap there is, the more opportunities there will be. There are millions of people that are searching and linking to high quality content, and if you have the ability to properly market your best content, you will succeed. It requires an immense amount of hard work and dedication, but that is something you have to learn for yourself.

Any thoughts? Post them in the comments section. I’d love to hear what you have to say about the blogosphere being overloaded with poor content, and how you would take advantage.

6 thoughts on “90% of Everything is Crap—Sturgeon’s Law”

  3. @Milorad: Good rant!

    > Content which isn’t crap is directly about taking action, doing stuff, offering methods by which one can actually achieve something.

    Absolutely. On the other hand this means engagement. Most blog articles I see are pure observation plus a little bit of comment which only acts as a fig-leaf.

    Another non-crappy approach is to do it the journalistic way which means becoming a filter (gatekeeper) for valuable information and resources the readers otherwise would not hear about.

  4. Lets look at this objectively. As someone who posts a lot of crap on his personal blog, I’ve become quite a crapologist. It’s that skill which allows me to identify this post of yours as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

    Commentary and observation makes up 90% of the 90% which is crap, and unfortunately most bloggers use their blogs to muse when nobody around them wants to listen.

    Usually our observations are shared with whoever has the misfortune of being in the vicinity when we’re talking to ourselves, but now that everyone has a blog, every idle observation is turned into a post because we feel like every thought we spend more than 2 seconds pondering must be worth writing down.

    It’s not.

    This post of yours simply observes the abundance of crap but does nothing to identify its source or to help people understand why even seasoned bloggers generate so much crap. Diggers and users of other bookmarking sites are guilty of perpetuating the ‘crapalanche’ as I call it, based on their agreement with particular observations, or their perception of humour, etc.

    Crap is easy to digest and is quickly passed on, which is why it invariably makes it onto Google’s front page, thereby further crapping up the internet. In fact, if I’d written about this crappy post on my crappy blog (even if I disagreed with it, which I don’t) it would have further escalated the crapfest.

    So how do we throttle the craptacular?

    Well, unfortunately that’s like asking your mother not to have an opinion about your new girlfriend. Bloggers want to express themselves but it’s that very expression which is choking the web.

    Content which isn’t crap is directly about taking action, doing stuff, offering methods by which one can actually achieve something. The only other non-crap content is wildly entertaining. Everything else is meaningless self-promotion, and that’s crap because nobody really cares about us the way we care about ourselves.

    Case in point: My link is attached to this crappy comment.

  5. Nice thought. I am sure that all the crap is also an easy chance to find niches and do it better. So probably somebody looking for a new niche should find the crap first to develop a ‘I will do it right’ concept

  6. James: Great insight. But there’s the rub, I guess: getting noticed, in order to be linked to.

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