Jun

11

Quo Vadis Blogosphere?

June 11, 2008 |

Sometimes I like to take a step (or two) back from it all and go over my old posts and try to see what the general trends are that I’ve been writing about lately. I know we do a lot of navael gazing in the tech blogosphere and maybe more so than in other blogging communities. Yet, I think sometimes it’s useful to think about the grand scheme of things.

In this post, I just want to highlight what I think are the major issues that are facing us as a community right now. I don’t have the crazy illusion that I can speak for everybody – so these are purely my own personal observations.

Echo Chamber and Information Overload

In between our favorite watering holes of TechMeme, FriendFeed and Twitter, we have created a perfect echo chamber that can be very hard to break out of. We are already producing so much content that it’s hard to keep up with even half of what the tech blogosphere produces – yet at the same time, we also all sometimes tend to congregate around the same topics (think ‘bitchmemes’ on Fridays).

There is a lot of recycled content (= me-too blogging), yet a lot of good, new content can (no matter what the optimists say) be left unread. No singled blogger (except for Mr. Scoble) can really keep up with it all anymore and so as we retrench to the common denominators (Mashable, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Scoble, etc.), new bloggers have a harder and harder time breaking through. Some of that is mitigated by the arrival of FriendFeed, where shared items have the same weight as a users own new blog posts – but finding those new items can be hard. We need to keep making an effort to help new bloggers get heard by actively looking for them and promoting them whenever we can.

The Plight of the Solo Blogger

At this point, there are once again less solo bloggers (pro and amateur) in the Techmeme Top 100 than before. It’s close to impossible for a solo blogger to make a living in the tech blogosphere. Advertising doesn’t cut it. Maybe that’s ok for a lot of people – but those who want to take their passion to the next level should have a chance to do so. An individual blogger just can’t compete with large mega-blogs that are able to pump out content 24/7. Part of the solution is joining a blogging network, but in the long run, there has to be another solution as well. Or maybe it’s just not possible for the solo blogger to make this a business and we do indeed have to start working for the ‘man…’

Advertising

Close related to this is the low return on advertising on blogs. Blogger have very few options beyond Google’s AdSense – and even those don’t bring in much more money than AdSense does anyway. You can start selling links, which gives you a stable, yet small, income – but that’s frowned upon for good reason. The online advertising market is suffering from the Google monopoly. Maybe a blogger could arrange a monthly sponsorship, but how many bloggers have enough pull to make that happen?

Comment Fragmentation and FriendFeed

I know a lot of people who really don’t want to talk about this anymore, but with FriendFeed and other aggregators slowly becoming more and more important and as users are using them more and more as social networks, this remains a major issue. Today, with Disqus, Sezwho, and Intense Debate, we have a wide variety of solutions to outsource our commenting system – but more and more, the conversation has moved away from our blog. I’m fine with that, but many bloggers see it as a challenge. There are some plugins that put FriendFeed comments on your blog – and while they work well enough, this is not a very graceful solution, as your blogs comments and the FF comments remain seperated.

Micro-Blogging vs. Full Blogs

Maybe this isn’t much of a question anymore, but there used to be a lot of talk about this (esp. with Twitter being down so often lately). How many bloggers end up writing more on Twitter than their own blogs? What makes a blogpost worthwhile over a Twitter post?


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