Edelman’s Steve Rubel has jumped on the “newvoices” bandwagon that we started a while back. (Welcome, Steve!) In case you had missed the original post regarding the “newvoices” tag, which appeared here in July, 2005, here’s what I proposed:
At least once a week, do a very simple thing. Find someone to whom you’ve never linked before, link to them, and tag the post with the following tag: newvoices.
Then, either in your aggregator, on your MyYahoo page, or wherever you want, subscribe to a feed of newvoices-tagged posts. Here’s what’ll happen: the good, emerging folks will come to you. Now for the really cool part.
This is a self-dampening system. It can’t evolve an “A-List,” since once you’ve linked to someone and tagged that initial post with a “newvoices” tag, that individual ceases to be a new voice for you. The next time you link to them, don’t tag the new post in this way, since for you, it’s no longer new. However, the really smart, cool, funny insightful folks who emerge will gather a lot of “newvoices” tagged links as they become visible. (N.B. Even if someone else has pointed to somebody with a newvoices tag, you should too! It’s not a contest to see who’s first…it’s an endorsement of someone to whom you haven’t linked previously.)
When I originally proposed the idea in July of ’05, here were the stats for posts tagged “newvoices”:
- None on Technorati
- None on IceRocket
- One on del.icio.us.
Now (Jan2007) there are over a hundred on del.icio.us alone, and at least a few dozen on Technorati and IceRocket.
Let’s keep this going!
Thanks to Dan Greenfield, whose great marketing blog is Bernaise Source, for the tip! (Dan is my newvoice for the week, by the way.) Dan also writes about speedblogging, which can be thought of as a complement to the newvoices tag.