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.
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