Give little kids a big bowl of free candy, and they’ll keep eating until they get sick. Give adults the same bowl, and most of them will pick out a couple of their favorites and then walk away to do something else. That’s pretty much the way it goes with any freebie – you consume a whole lot for a while, then you start tapering off, becoming more selective.
Blogs (and, I’d suspect, other free media) are no different. Recently, we’ve seen people start to fret about the looming attention crisis, which is a highfalutin way of saying they’re becoming overwhelmed by the number of blogs in their RSS feeds. Om Malik speaks for many of us when he writes, “I have been overwhelmed, and have started trimming the feed list.” This is the blogospheric equivalent of “Mommy, my tummy hurts.”
Some people max out at 5 feeds, some at 50. I’ve even read some people claim they’re topping out at a truly nauseating 200. I currently have 27 feeds, and that’s way too many. I’ve gone from adding to pruning. Most of us will ultimately cut back to a handful of blogs that we read regularly, supplementing them with the odd post from here or there. That’s only natural.
What it means, though, is that the blogosphere is going to end up looking a lot like the old “mainstream media.” Rather than being a great democratic free-for-all, the blogosphere will become steadily more rigid and hierarchical. Structurally, it’ll resemble the magazine world. A relatively small number of high-traffic blogs will dominate the market, and then there’ll be a whole lot of more specialized blogs with fewer readers. (I’m not including here the zillions of “my diary” blogs, which are not aimed at gaining broad readerships and tend to be short-lived, anyway.) It won’t be quite as hard for blogs to climb the hierarchy as it is in the print world (simply because the costs of blogging are so much lower), but it won’t be easy, either.
Indeed, the technologies we use to manage our blog reading will reinforce the hierarchy. RSS, for example, imposes the old subscription model on the blogosphere – it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, as it tends to lock us into a set of favorite blogs. (Even though blogs are free, the subscription model imposes real switching costs.) Also, the inevitable (in my view) shift away from blog search engines based on posting date (like Technorati’s traditional default mode) to ones that use measures of “relevance” based on traffic or link intensity (like Google or Sphere.com or Technorati’s “authority” engine) will also make the hierarchy more rigid and less democratic – as will third-party headline aggregators like Memeorandum, which also tend to reflect and reinforce established patterns of popularity.
The fact is, truly democratic media is good in theory but exhausting in practice. Our natural bent toward efficiency in consuming information will turn blogs into another mainstream medium.
Physics type ranking systems are so amazing. Velocity, Acceleration, Jerk, Gravity, Time. All these ranking/metric systems can be applied to blogs, as well as all information, and this gives me a nice comfortable perspective on how I experience the world.
After all, the only reason I can tell what i’m typing is coming out correctly is because my amazing Feed Reader of a mind is able to sort and understand the lovely formatted XML feeds being thrown at it.
Which is quite the reverse of Scoble’s view of the world – unlerss you concede the likes of the Vespa thing can be replicated globally.
Not convinced. How many bloggers burn out at Gawker etc? How long will they continue to work for peanuts? For as long as they realise it is not their fame that matters but the brands they represent. Adn then, they will have taken the last step towards MSM
Another problem with blogs is that they tend to shift from thought provoking articles to “let’s feed the public” type of articles.
It would be nice to have a harvard business review kind of blog syndication: people write blog entries, and the best articles get selected by the RSS feed. But I guess such services need a professional board, and hence are likely to be supplied by the magazines themselves.
this analysis assumes everyone will end up reading the *same* five or ten blogs. that seems unlikely.
look at the TV industry – do you think the internet is going to move in the opposite direction – to fewer information channels, rather than more?
one of my favourite blog aphorisms is in the blogosphere “you are famous for 15 people”, which seems like a nice take on the old global village ideas of marshall mcluhan.
of course memorandum style short tailing has a role. but so does diversity. If you live in boise idaho you’re more likely to subscribe to a whats on in boise blog, aren’t you?
James, No, I don’t think it assumes that everyone will read the same 5 or 10 blogs. What it assumes is that most people will end up subscribing to a relatively small number of blogs, some of which will be of fairly general interest while some will be more specialized (according to where they live, or what they do, or what their hobbies are). Because many other people will also tend to subscribe to the same general interest blogs, they will come to dominate the market (in terms of circulation) while the specialized ones will, by definition, have smaller overall circulations. Within each specialization, though, you’ll have the same effect – with a few dominant blogs and a bunch of others with smaller readerships. It’s the same phenomenon we see with magazines, though as I noted there will be more blogs than magazines because the costs of running a blog are so low.
Right. This is the power law critique, well-known to many of us way down on the Z-list, and can be found mentioned in a few
places
But it doesn’t get a hughe amount of attention …
5-10 blogs might mean a whole lot more than it sounds as time goes on. It’s important to consider that most blogs at the moment are single person initiatives, such as RoughType or Blog.Outer-Court.com by Philipp Lenssen. In due time, more blogs will probably start to function the way BoingBoing and many others do where a group of people get together and make a more sustainable long term blog. These types of blogs create a type of editorial review process by the team and reduce the number of blogs you need to read. BoingBoing might be equivilent to reading 20+ blogs. In the end 5-10 blogs might equal 200 unique voices.
I’ve written exhaustively on this in The New Gatekeepers series.
I sent it to Nick last week; not sure if he used it as inspiration.
Justin: ” … where a group of people get together and make a more sustainable long term blog.”
What are these “magazines” of which you speak? Did I hear you say “Reader’s Digest might be equivalent to reading 20+ periodicals. In the end 5-10 magazines might equal 200 unique writers”?
How Mainstream Can Blogs Get, Anyway?
I agree that a relatively small number of blogs could dominate blog traffic, and there could be a whole lot of specialized blogs with fewer readers. But I think the orders of magnitude of “relatively small”, “whole lot”, and “fewer” are radically dif…
I think that if you limit the number of blogs (personal thoughts) that you read you are limiting your ability, as a human being , to grow and develop ! The more blogs the better.
If you want to learn about “childhood development” you read about childhood development
Restricting the number of blogs you read restricts your ability to intellectually grow.
Crazydave
Nicholas Carr Disputes The Threat to Mainstream Media From The Long Tail (CNET, TSCM, TWX)
Nick Carr, ex-executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, argues that far from overturning current media models, blogs will come to resemble “old media”. He writes:
…the blogosphere is going to end up looking a lot like the …
The Ups and Downs of Blogging
Information is power.
Thus less surprising are the buzz of information and the communication of it. My project here at Stanford is about information and how we can transfer that information from in-the-field to an information database. Initially the …
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I think the blogs will change the writer perspective to greater heights. IT will provide a platform for all.
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The mainstream blogosphere by Nicholas Carr
November 02, 2005
Give little kids a big bowl of free candy, and they’ll keep eating until they get sick. Give adults the same bowl, and most of them will pick out a couple of their favorites and then walk away to do something else. That’…
On Lateral Passes
or, How A Meme With A Reference To A Jew For Jesus Hip Hop Artist Reminded Me Of Dangerous Ideas
I don’t really remember how I got there, but I ended up at memepool, the brainchild of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter and Jeff Smith. Posted on