Thought Leadership

You, know, I’ve gotten far away from blogging about blogging. It’s an overdone topic that had its day in the sun, but we’ve moved on to, thankfully, other topics. However, the depth of content still discourages me. Yes, there are literally millions of blogs out there and the number of really quality blogs have increased dramatically. However, the signal to noise ratio is still very bad, in my opinion.

What am I referring to?

In political blogging, people are still quoting and linking to Daily Kos and Captain’s Quarters as sources of inspiration for posts.

In gadget blogging, people still read from the same page as Engadget or Gizmodo.

In business blogging, Seth Godin and Lawrence Lessig.

For SEO and marketing, Shoemoney and SEOMoz still rule the roost.

As they should. All of these blogs have been and continue to produce excellent original content, and most importantly, thought leadership. In whatever area they write, they are producing content that attracts readers to innovative ideas and concepts and helps those readers explore related concepts and thoughts. In the case of Engadget and Gizmodo, they are news breakers, but

The difference between the long tail and the head of tail sites like those mentioned above, and in my opinion, the wave of the future is in thought leadership. More and more bloggers thinking for themselves, maybe taking some inspiration from some of these blogs, but proactively creating original content.

I mentioned that I was interviewed the other day by Minic Rivera. In that interview, I talked about how at any given time, I’ve got numerous ideas running around in my head. In some cases, these ideas sit up there for months - as the Twitter Terminal Velocity post did. Other posts come out of conversations I have that coalesce into fully baked thoughts overnight. In all these cases, I spend time thinking through topics before writing and when the writing actually does occur, it is more like a braindump.

We need more thought leaders in blogging. People who will take the time to think fully about ideas and develop those thoughts. People that share these thoughts after much consideration and analysis.

That’s what my idea of an ideal blog world is. Am I smoking crack?

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About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He served as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.