The PR blogosphere has become an 'echo chamber'

While there are a lot of PR blogs out there they don't seem to be attracting much notice beyond themselves.
Perhaps that's just the nature of the industry, no-one but us practitioners care much about PR.
Or perhaps its because we spend too much time just blogging about PR and blogging about blogging. Perhaps the "PR is dead, cluetrain is a-coming debate' has led us all up a dull, fruitless cul de sac.
Or maybe links are a flawed way of assessing influence. The links maybe trivial, even risible, but perhaps traffic is not.
A closer look at the pubsub PR list suggests that the rises and falls on the daily list are heavily driven by small groups of people linking to each other, and in many cases themselves!
The one exception to this might be Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion who attracts far more in links than anyone else on the list. Steve obviously has a much broader appeal than the rest of us. Though this broadness may itself be largely confined to geeks and cluetrainers.
Even here there are some interesting anomalies. For instance, Steve got 40 fresh inlinks on the 25 November but 14 (34%) of these came from steverubel.typepad.com which also appears to be micropersuasion.
A further 4 links came from feedburner feeds which appear frequently in the link logs of many PR blogs. It seems to be double-dipping because a link comes from the blog and from the feed. Del.ici.ous feeds may also generate extra links in the same way.
On 20 November, Rubel got 165 incoming links, of these 20 were from steverubel.typepad.com and 19 from Steve's feedburner feed. About 14 other links came from other feedburner feeds and about 16 from del.ici.ous accounts. This is getting close to half, Steve's nevertheless still impressive, incoming links.
Once we get beyond Steve the picture is much less impressive. (Steve gets incoming sites and links which equate to about the next 10 on the list combined).
On 25 November, fellow Australian Lee Hopkins jumped an impressive 31 places (to number 9, the 3rd biggest jump on the day) with 21 links from 4 sites. Interestingly, Lee seems to have 2 feedburner feeds and these generated 19 of those 21 links.
Naked Conversations (number 4 on the pubsub list) is another star blogosphere site which appears at 272 in Feedster's top 500. On the 25 November however its authors Shel Israel and Robert Scoble were indeed fortunate that Lee liked something on their site because its entire total of 5 incoming links came from Lee's blog and his 2 feedburner feeds.
The For immediate release podcast blog (number 3) does very well out of links from links from the blogs of its hosts Neville Hobson (number 7)and Shel Holtz, number 68, (though Shel seems less active on the linking side of things) and regular commentator Lee Hopkins. FIR also does well out of its feedburner site. And, of course, Lee's two feedburner feeds and Shel's.
Interestingly, Neville also has two domains that generate links nevon.net and nevon.typepad.com. Perhaps this double domain bonus occurs when a typepad user moves to another domain.
On 23 November, the FIR blog got 7 links from 5 sites (a reasonably good day) and only 1 was from a blog or feed not directly associated with the podcast. And that was a Naked Conversations account of Shel Israel's appearance on the FIR podcast.
I could go on like this - its intriguing following the links - but the point is two-fold.
One trivial. If you want to go up the link rankings you might try getting into a small group cross-linking situation as well as getting a second url for your blog and a few feedburner feeds.
Second, more seriously, is the PR blogosphere an echo chamber and what can be done to broaden it out a bit. Or doesn't it matter?
POSTSCRIPT: This post attracted the attention of several sites (from outside the PR list) enough to see me soaring from a link rank of 34,026 to 710 in two days and land me third place on the pubsub PR list - ya gotta love this stuff. Shows you just how easy it is kiddo.
BTW apart from a very thoughtful comment (see below) from Philip Young of mediations, I've yet to experience any 'conversation' from the PR blogosphere on this topic. Partly this might show just how white bread american PR blogging is and they're all sleeping off turkey right now. Or it might be just the old PR 'put on a happy face' instinct to avoid anything that's negative kickin' in. C'mon guys let's not just talk about conversations let's have one which is not just a FIGJAM effort as we aussies say.
POSTSCRIPT 2: Lee Hopkins has an excellent response here and also read John Wagner's response

Comments

[Philip Young]

Mediations leapt up to No2 in the PubSub charts last week on the back of our Making the News conference, largely because the speakers all blogged about their experiences in Sunderland (and I happen to think this was good thing as it generated useful debate). As an experiment I decided to post off-topic for the forst time on Friday, with a short story I wrote years ago, as a tribute to the footballer George Best.

Although this did nothing for my tumbling PubSub rating it did bring in more traffic than the conference posts. Interestingly quite a lot of visitors followed a link from a post I made the Guardian newspaper's George Best tribute page (so I have made the earth-shattering discovery that more people are interested in football than PR!)

But I would also add that I get quite a lot of visits from those who google public relations ethics etc, which thereby seems to bring new people into the relatively tight world of PR blogging blogs. For all the echochamber stuff, people like Neville - and a certain T Cook - are doing a valuable job for those who, like me, are trying to understand what is happening at the cutting edge of PR.

[Eric Eggertson]

I believe a lot of the links to a blog from the blog itself represent comments the author has posted in their comments section. The blog software creates a link to the author's site, which in this case is the same as the blog they're commenting in.

Someone who engages with their readers a lot (instead of ignoring the comments) will show up as having a lot of self-referentical links. Not necessarily a plot to artificially boost their ranking...

[Eric Eggertson]

Another exmple would be someone providing a link to a previous article on a related topic that is in the same blog. Again, I don't think it's blatant self-promotion. It's an effort to help people follow a train of thought or a conversation that is taking place in several postings in the same blog.

[Trevor Cook]

Thanks Eric. If people are being rewarded for responding to comments than that's great in my view. But I didn't actually see any evidence of that happening. Its more about people having a joint blog like FIR and separate blogs and cross-linking; where people use feedburner and get extra links from their RSS feeds and where people seem to have two urls for the same blog eg micorpersuasion.com and steverubel.typepad.com

I don't think that people are necessarily doing these things deliberately to promote themselves in the rankings. But they do seem to me to be flaws in pubsub's rankings (and maybe technorati and feedster as well, I don't have the expertise to judge), flaws which are easily exploitable by anyone who is that way inclined.

I'm also just as, or more, interested in the observation that linking in the PR blogosphere (and perhaps elsewhere) indicates that there are virtually no conversations in the PR blogosphere of any substance (a fair bit of self & mutual congratulation of course) and very little interaction between PR blogs and the broader blogosphere - the latter is very disturbing if we hope to see PR bloggers as advocates for the adoption of social media more broadly

[Eric Eggertson]

All good points, Trevor. I wouldn't say it's a complete echo chamber, but certainly there's a group who tend to link to each other. It can be hard to avoid, if you are interested in the same things.

I'd be surprised if the Pubsub ranking system couldn't be significantly improved. For now, the 60-day ranking seems to offer a decent snapshot of people who are probably more influential than others, but it's by no mean foolproof.

[Philip Young]

Maybe it is a bit like internal and external comms - some of us 'state of PR' bloggers are quite good at internal comms, but very few have built ongoing external relationships. Although I don't suggest Mediations should be in the media mainstream, perhaps I should worry that I don't have many (any?) links in from practitioner sites.

[Kevin Dugan]

Trevor - The tryptophan is wearing off so I thought I'd jump in. We've exchanged thoughts here on this topic in the past and on the futility of trying to associate old media metrics with blogs. I've reiterated it over on Lee's blog.
http://leehopkins.net/2005/11/29/echo-beach-far-away-in-time/#comment-207

The other item on linking to consider are aggregation sites like WebProNews and Corante. They take good content to new audiences. This might toy with the rankings, but I think these sites are well-intended and help get the word out.

I do not measure where I am linking (pr vs. non pr). I just link to posts that support or add to what I am trying to say.

Bottom line with PubSub is that rankings based on one day's worth of traffic are pretty pointless. I've seen mine move up, down and sideways. You nailed it and I've never been high enough in the rankings to feel comfortable/credible agreeing with you.

RE: "linking in the PR blogosphere (and perhaps elsewhere) indicates that there are virtually no conversations in the PR blogosphere of any substance"

This really depends on your definition. In the past, I've tried posting on topics other than social media...discuss the rest of the PR toy box. It is something I enjoy doing, but expanding the conversation slows down my traffic.

There is currently a topic getting a lot of traction in the pr blogosphere--an odd mix of whining, puffery and very good intentions. Until some action results from it, I do not see a need to post on it. We're already seeing a rash of updates, re-explanations and analysis on the original idea. YAWN (and that's not a turkey dinner putting me to sleep this time).

I have been presenting to industry associations and internally on social media and I am working on a project that will remain under wraps for now. I’ve not stopped trying to advance the cause, just not visibly at my blog.

Finally, my blogging habits and overall views are changing now that I've left agency life and moved into a corporate setting. Hopefully my content suggests this, as I now practice marketing and PR. Unfortunately it also means I have less time to blog and less incentive professionally to do so.

My two cents.