Matt Linderman, who works for the web firm 37signals, has a post up about the differential impacts of the mainline press and what he calls “micromedia”:

What we’ve found: When it comes to spreading a story, the mainstream media isn’t as important as the micromedia. Being written up at the right blogs has had way more impact for us than the press we’ve gotten in big-circulation publications.

He says that a link on prominent blogs produces far more traffic to 37signals’ site than mentions in even the biggest traditional media outlets: “These smaller sites don’t have the same volume of readers as, say, Newsweek, but the people who do read them actually care about what they have to say. There’s a relationship. The audience isn’t made up of random readers, it’s people who think a certain way.“

In other words, the power of the niche again. I can verify this from experience. In a past Internet life, I ran perhaps the largest questionably legal mix-CD trading operation in the world. It got written up in a variety of newspapers, including The New York Times. Being in a story on the front page of the NYT’s Circuits section was worth a couple hundred extra visitors to my web site. But being mentioned in a email sent out by Daily Candy, the “insider’s guide to what’s hot, new, and undiscovered — from fashion and style to gadgets and travel,” was worth…17,000.