My last post on Filed By doesn’t seem to have come off exactly as I intended it…which is good, actually, since a couple of good comments have been made that force me to clarify what I was trying to say.
By asking the question “What is the problem Filed By is trying to solve?” I wasn’t implying that it wasn’t solving a problem (which might be how it reads, even to me on second glance). I was actually trying to say that it fills a niche that is currently empty. To me, Filed By is potentially an excellent discovery tool—and co-creator Mike Shatzkin’s comment gives even more weight to that:
Because of the nature of Filedby and the hard work we’ve done on SEO, we expect authors’ Filedby sites routinely to show up higher in searches for their name than their own sites or their publisher web pages will. Given that they can control things on our site, including deep-linking to any other web presence that they have, we believe that will create a compelling reason for ALL authors to, at least, “claim” and correct their pages
My cocktail party metaphor was meant to bring up the idea Filed by being like mingling, sharing clever anecdotes and not necessarily knowing who you might be getting a nightcap with after the event…as opposed to the monogamous and differently pleasurable tete-a-tete by the fire which more aptly describes an avid blog follower’s relationship with one particularly committed author.
So—file this one under unintended snark. My argument that this is a different kind of web presence for authors than a blog is not unsound, I don’t think, but I am absolutely willing to concede that this could be supplementary as well as potentially substitutionary.
