Too Much Blogging?

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Too Much Blogging?

Seth Godin (the first blogger I ever read) says we are blogging too much and its leading to a tragedy of the commons as we use up precious reader attention. It's a theme I have mined myself in previous posts.

I agree with Seth that we are approaching an attention crisis, but I don't think blogging less is the answer, although I may have other reasons for doing that. I think we'll get more bloggers over time, not less, and as we get more content creators and more or less the same number of readers, we'll need new ways of consuming this content.

Although I use a bunch of feed aggregators (newsgator, bloglines, iTunes, MyYahoo, netvibes, etc), I really don't read blogs in a feed reader. I have way too many blogs to consume that way (at least for my brain).

I use tools like delicious, digg, reddit, memeorandum, tailrank, technorati, blogs themselves, etc to filter the noise and give me the best of the blog world every day. My method isn't perfect, but its good enough. I don't miss too much that's important.

And then I have blogs that keep me real, like Savage Distortion, Trickster, Chartreuse, Brooklyn Vegan, and Gotham Gal (among others) that don't seem to pop up on those blog aggregators. We need a way to incorporate what's important to us into these filters and I am already seeing signs of that (see Tail Rank's filter feature for example).

Umair says (in a rambling post where he takes some possibly deserved potshots at the US):

I think Seth's post is this kind of misuse of economics. The genius of micromedia is that it blows apart the notion of distribution of a scarce resource. The whole point is that attention is no longer a commons; now, it's about individual expectations and preferences.

I take that as a sign that Umair agrees with me on this one. I can never be sure. But in any case, I think Seth is right that there is a ton of blogging going on, but I am not sure he's right about what to do about it.

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Tracked on Mar 15, 2006 10:24:41 AM

Posted March 14, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

I read all my blogs through feeds.

All those tagging services you mention are next to useless to me because I've never understood them.

Posted by: Dave | Mar 14, 2006 8:37:17 AM

Clearly we touch an interesting notion when you say "my method isn't perfect, but its good enough": where is the truth, and how can you cover everything on a certain topic (i.e. pretend to be an "expert" in that particular field) in today's information society?

As David Weinberger says we don't live in a world where there is a truth behind every question. We have millions of information that say contradictory things on virtually any matter. So at some point you just have to say "what I have is good enough for me", even if you know it is not exhaustive or perfect. There is no other way it seems.

Aren't we in a situation where the benefits of information overload greatly surpass the benefits of information rarity?

Posted by: Laurent | Mar 14, 2006 11:51:14 AM

Seth is so right.

As Roger Waters of Pink Floyd said, we are entertaining ourselves to death. (All the while our adversaries are figuring out how to fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers and build nukes, but that's a heated argument for another day.)

"Personal publishing" or "user generated content" (or whatever we call it during the Web 3.1415 bubble of 2010) is valuable and interesting but it produces mostly drivel (yes even my precious comments), created, consumed and remembered nominally if at all.

And (with apologies to my statistician friends) an infinite number of amateur musicians making energetic sincere sounds will never add up to a symphony by Bach played by the NY Philharmonic. And an infinite number of bloggers blogging will never produce a Shakespeare sonnet -- or the New York Times or HBO on their worst days.

Which doesn't mean blogs or "user generated content" isn't valuable, just that, while its thrilling that new tools and technologies empower amateurs, there will always be a difference between professional and amateur levels of work, and a need and demand for both.

Finally, is anyone but me so utterly worn out and turned off by the seemingly neverending, overheated rhetoric about "revolutions" and the end of the "MSM" and the (sigh) "blow[ing] apart" of things? Do we have no memory? No... perspective?

Two quotes come to mind:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

You say you want a revolution?
Well, you know
We all want to change the world.

You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead.
-- Lennon-McCartney "Revolution"

Posted by: steve | Mar 14, 2006 12:14:03 PM

There is a nasty truth about the long tail...

Most stuff in the long tail heartily deserves it's obscurity.

There is an opportunity in building tools that identify quality content based on users manipulations of it. Tools like these can help separate wheat from chaff.

Posted by: Erik Schwartz | Mar 14, 2006 5:24:31 PM

It's a standard scaling issue: now that there's so much user-generated content, the next thing we need is user-generated editorial control. Some of the sites you mentioned (delicious, digg, reddit, memeorandum, tailrank, technorati) do this in different ways -- as do metafilter, yahoo myweb, etcetera.

It has been very interesting to watch this evolution.

Posted by: J.D. Falk | Mar 14, 2006 5:40:44 PM

Fred, don't you really need a personalized filter and suggestion tool that combs through all your fees and only shows stories you consider relevant, and also suggest new items from blogs not on your list that are relvant? And shouldn't this be a learning system that takes your feedback and gets better over time?

Posted by: Joe Agliozzo | Mar 14, 2006 7:39:43 PM

I agree that less blogging is not the answer. Sure, we might all benefit by tapering off a bit, but it's the freedom to access the kind of information that our geeked-out techno world has to offer that makes this such a kick.

As a recruiter, I live for this info. Heck, I don't have to read it all, but I do have the privilege of sorting through the barrel of info and taking out what is pertinent to me. And my team. And the people I'm recruiting.

Long live blog-clutter,

Dennis

Posted by: Dennis Smith | Mar 15, 2006 10:00:27 AM

An abundance (even an overabundance) of blogging isn't a "tragedy of the commons", in which a resource whose consumption is unregulated is consumed in excess until its exhaustion (and/or extinction).

As far as I can tell, peoples' available daily attention spans are a renewable resource that are replenished -- why just about daily!

All he's describing is that competition for attention is more fierce. No surprise there.

Posted by: just.a.guy | Mar 15, 2006 2:29:34 PM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC