It is with great interest that I am watching the discussion surrounding Scoble LinkGate 2007.  For those not following along at home, Robert blew a gasket this weekend when his exclusive video coverage of the Intel 45 Nanometer announcement did not get links from Slashdot.org, Engadget or Gizmodo.  The result of course is that TechMeme is full of discussion on this today.  Robert continues to pile on today with his pissing off the blogosphere post.

I can empathize with Robert to a point on this.  I am well aware of how damn hard it is to build an audience.   Robert is tasked with doing this for PodTech a relatively new business and the stakes are high.   Exclusive content like Robert's Intel piece took time and money to produce (flight to Portland, cameras, bandwidth, a crew and more) and needs to show a return.  I can imagine that PodTech looked at a piece like this as a bootstrap for their network.  The hope being that the exclusive piece will get Slashdotted, Digged or high profile tech blogs (Engagdget / Gizmodo) will also follow suit.   The hope is that a few of those viewers will stick around, view other PodTech content and maybe others will subscribe to the feed to return another day.  Building an audience, inch by incch is hard work.  This all takes persistance and time all while you are justifying to your sponsors and leaders your content style and tone.  So when the Intel piece doesn't result in a lot of flow (guess we're still in the eyeball game ;-)) from the big sites Robert flew off the handle in frustration. 

I believe as this business grows, it is going to get even harder to bootstrap the businesses soley through traditional grass roots/link based marketing.  With the number of blogs and media sites continuing to grow, it will get harder and harder to get links to even exclusive the most content.  Steve Gilmor, a good friend of PodTech has a strong opinion on attention data versus links.   I wonder what he thinks?


Recently departed PodTech employee Christopher Coulter put it best in the following comment on Robert's blog.

You can link if you wanta
Leave your friends behind, and if your friends don’t link, well they’re no friends of mine.

I say, we can link where we want to, A place where they will never find.
And we can act like we come from out of this world.
Leave the real one far behind.

I say,we can link, we can link.
Everything out of control.

Sorry had to get some Canadian content into this :-), but the point being you never know when you are going to get the links from the big sites and you can't count on it.  It is interesting to follow and see what happens next as the attention war heats up.  I probably should remind folks that I am writing this from a similar perch as Robert .  The communities created out of my team (Channels 9 + 10) hopes to build a captive audience too.  In a similar vain we hope that when we get exclusive content the large flow sites will link to us too and that our audinece will grow.  Although my teams business is funded ultimately by software sales, not ads we still need to justify our existance.  The good news is blogging links is not our sole method of promotion.

This will be interesting to watch play out in the next year.  Stay tuned.

technorati tags: channel+9, channel+10, evangelism+network, podtech