Size does not matter (in the blogosphere)
communication February 11th. 2008, 9:59am
Big cities vs. small towns: some would say that bigger is better. There’s no doubt that cities have a critical mass of opportunity due to the results of population density. Both mass media and social media do seem to have capitals in the largest cities of the United States and other parts of the world, giving them a cornucopia of riches to select from. Techology has leveled the playing field, though. Today, especially in the blogosphere, size doesn’t matter.
I wrote a guest post a few weeks ago at Tad Chef’s SEO 2.0 blog. The post was called I Live In The Blogosphere and it summarized some of my thoughts about blogging. In short, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you came from, or what you do - we all start out with equal potential. To badly paraphrase that famous line about the movie Alien: in the blogosphere, no one can see where you are screaming from. We all scream equally, although when we all scream simultaneously, it’s hard to pick out an individual voice.
I StumbledUpon a cool blog post this weekend: How significant are we?The post shows the relative size of the planets of our solar system compared to each other, and then our sun compared to other stars.? It’s one of those images that can really put things into perspective. It made me think about my current home. I know some readers live in larger cities (I apparently have a few readers in London, England - hello there!) Let’s compare some things for a moment.
- I live in a town of 5,000 people. There are about 25,000 people who live in a 40 - 50 KM radius of that town.
- The closest city and airport to my home is about 100 KM away (the airport is another 20 KM from the city). The city’s population is approximately 50,000 people, with another 35,000 people in surrounding areas.
- My province’s population is approximately 750,000 people. That’s slightly larger than the core population of San Francisco (which is about 1/10th of the Bay Area).
- My country’s estimated population is 33 million. There are three million more people living in the state of California.
SO WHAT?
I’ve got (relatively) high speed Internet access and I know my way around the Web. I’ve read lots of interesting information and I’ve processed it. I’ve made contact with an increasingly amazing array of people. I’ve got a steadily improving blog and growing readership. And I live in a town of 5,000 people in a rural part of the world.
As I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter where you are or where you came from. As long as you’ve got a brain and the ability to broadcast, it doesn’t make a darned bit of difference where you are. Technology can bridge virtually any “disadvantage”.
Besides, one person’s “big” is another person’s “small”.
Just ask the stars.
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