Do British bloggers have an inferiority complex?

My heart sank this afternoon while reading this TechCrunch UK article and its related comments. Written by Ashley Norris, my old boss at Shiny Media, the post itself is an interesting look at the challenges facing anyone trying to build a UK blog network. But the comments swiftly descend into a.) Shinybashing and b.) tech blogger infighting.

I'll keep out of the latter, since I know and like all the people involved. But I do have some thoughts on the UK blogs v US blogs thing. Mainly: why do we beat ourselves up for this so much? US blogs and blog networks are bigger, have much more traffic, and make much more money. Why? Because they've been doing it longer, have more internet users to target, and have more VCs flinging cash their way.

So what? Comparing the younger UK blogging market to that can only ever make us feel inferior. Yet we still do it. When I was at Tech Digest, I got sucked into it myself - comparing ourselves to sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, and fretting over how they got so much traffic, and why their stories got shedloads more Diggs than ours, and generally feeling a bit down about why we weren't closing the gap faster.

Silly, eh? Not least because these blogs were way better resourced than us anyway. The six of us who were covering CES for Tech Digest and Shiny Media this year met up with Gizmodo one night - you couldn't meet a nicer bunch of people, incidentally - and there were about 18 of them, all covering the show for that one site. Whenever I saw Engadget at the same show, they had proper broadcast-quality cameras and even boom mic operators.

Against this background, comparisons will just make us feel shit. Meanwhile, we spent our time trying to use these US promotion tools (Digg, Fark etc) to attract traffic, despite the fact that many of their users would be more likely to like, well, US blogs. That's part of the problem for Britblogs - we don't have UK equivalents of these sites, to attract the sort of traffic that's more likely to stick around once they land on our sites.

What could help? Those kind of sites for sure. Better ways to attract local readers - retaining them then comes down to the quality of the site of course. More investment so we can get boom mics of our very own? It'd be handy. More of a community spirit would be good too - instead of fighting or studiously ignoring each other (i.e. refusing to link), Britblogs and blog networks should be talking about how they can work together to build the market.

There are lots of reasons to be cheerful right now. As Ashley points out, big brands are finally willing to advertise on blogs. Lots of PR agencies are working hard to convince their clients to bring bloggers into their press events and activity, while bloggers and PR people are figuring out how their relationship can work (and yes, for some bloggers that means no relationship at all - but I won't get into that argument!).

Better still, there are some really smart people working on blogs in the UK, both within companies like Shiny, and off their own backs. We can certainly take inspiration and learn lessons from the way US blogs have developed. But instead of feeling inferior, we should focus more on how we can improve things here.

Comments

[Bulent]

In answer to your question: yes.

[Stuart Dredge]

Heh, it would have taken a lot less time to write the post if I'd gone with that answer ;o)

[Owain]

The trouble is it's a zero sum game Stu.

We all know Brits who read US blogs. How many US folk in comparison really read and follow UK blogs (or even sites)?

Sure they stumble in on the pillar content or via search, but they're basically the Imperial power wondering why at the barbarians before swiftly returning back to their bread and circuses.

Or something like that!