I saw Brian Haughey's great article on Google Trends over at Associated Content where he writes that Google's reducing the number of keywords listed on Google Trends from 100 to just 40, a reduction of 60 keywords, will hurt small bloggers.
(He uses the term "small-time" which I think is insulting to the legions of one-writer bloggers, but I'll let that go.)
Haughey:
The drop of 60 trends hurts the small-time blogger sites, as the top 40 results favors established e-magazines and newspapers. An article written on a popular site like Yahoo! will have a better chance of breaking into the Google Top 40 than a marginal blog post breaking into the top 100 and moving upward from there via user curiosity.
As a constant daily user of Google Trends, I think Haughey is correct but there's a way for "small bloggers" to counter that change: team up. Really bloggers do this anyway, but the tendency is for small blogs to echo what the large news sites put out there.
Small bloggers should team up more often and share blog post topics less likely to be found on sites like Yahoo. If 100 blogs did this, the result could be to break into the Google Trends top 40 depending on the keyword, but teaming up in effect makes a large blog ring.
Another way around this change is for the same bloggers to share writers, then apply for Google News status (since Google News insists on blogs having multiple writers) and have their blog's posts listed at the top of or the front page of a keyword search for a topic. But even here, Google favors the larger news sites.
And from that perspective, if I were running a news site like, say, SFGate.com, I'd have recirprocal link and content deals with as many local blogs as possible, thus taking better advantage of traffic from them should the same bloggers team up on one topic that the mainstream media isn't covering.
Zennie62 Live on USTREAM.TV and BlogTalkRadio
Coming soon I'm going to try a kind of experimental show combining UStream.tv and BlogTalkRaio. I did it before just to get the hang of the process. But the idea is to have a kind of streaming and call-in show at once. One can't call in to Ustream.tv and BlogTalkRadio doesn't have live stream capability. Tech aside, I'm going to cover the topics of the day with a guest at times, or a video personality, or both. You'll be able to see the stream from all of my blogs. Stay tuned.
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