The $10,000 Blog Challenge

John Scott of v7n announced yesterday that he will be giving away $10,000 to people who read his blog. You're probably thinking - "Wow, how pathetic is this guy that he has to pay people to read his blog?" and you're also probably wondering why he would shell out money just to get readers. Really guys, it's not as bad as it sounds. Sure, he'll benefit from increased traffic and coverage, but there's a larger issue at hand.

John Scott believes, as do many others, that the blogosphere resembles an 8th grade clique. There's the cool, popular crowd up top who all hang out together and fuel eachother's successes. They are the so-called trend-setters, what they do is cool and great, and if you don't want to be made a fool of, you'd better be nice to them. Then there's the average crowd -this group encompasses most bloggers. They have their loyal friends and readers, but they lack the connections to make it big. Sometimes the average blogger gets lucky and gets pulled into the cool crowd, but that doesn't happen all that often.

This kind of reminds me of the whole "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" thing. The "A-list" bloggers all link to eachother, and very, very rarely link to "little" guys. Meanwhile, everyone else is left to scramble and kiss up to the A-listers hoping to be fed some scraps in the way of a link or a mention. Some might liken the lesser-known bloggers to dogs performing tricks just to get noticed. Bad talk an A-lister, and you're blacklisted. It's kind of pathetic.

John Scott wants this practice to end. And so with the start of his new "contest" - the $10,000 Blog Challenge - he hopes to bring this issue to light and change the way things operate in the blogosphere. To participate in the challenge, bloggers must make their intentions to link to lesser-known and unknown blogs known on their blog, and actually follow through with it. He stresses that it would be preferred to not just link to them, but mention them in the actual content. Oh, and make sure you don't link to the Technorati top 100 blogs.

The grand prize winner will take home $3,000 cash, and remaining $7,000 will be distributed to the top 70 runners-up who will each receive $100 worth of schwag, cash, or gift certificates.

So I'd like to take John up on his challenge and participate. From now and for the foreseeable future, this blog will feature some really great unknown or little known blogs. I won't be featuring any old blog for the heck of it. Sorry guys. These blogs must be GOOD. I know that there are probably still some librarian readers out there who may still be reading this, and yes, I will be featuring some librarian blogs as well. There are some really great ones out there. But I will also be featuring blogs outside of the library world from a wide range of topics.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Please keep all hands, feet, and other objects inside the ride at all times. Thank you, and enjoy your day at Geauga Lake. ;)

Our first featured blog is coming soon....