Shots Across The Bow

A Dying Breed?

According to Donald Sensing, individual blogs are the past; group blogs are the future.

I have also contemplated the future of blogging and have concluded that single-author sites are the wave of the past. Group blogging, with only a few exceptions such as Instapundit (of course), is becoming the norm. I think it almost certainly because the time requirements for a single author to keep a site going are oppressive, if the site is to have a significant daily readership - say, more than 2,000.

After posting, Rev. Sensing apparently got pasted with a lot of angry emails, and several websites posted angry denunciations of his comments.

He responded with an update on his original post:

My, my, such over-reactions from commenters...the vast majority of blogs have low readership now, and by that I mean in the dozens...the fact is that low-readership blogs are not significant in importance to the blogosphere at large, no matter how important they are to their authors or few-dozen readers...they are utterly unimportant to everyone else and have no effect whatsoever in larger society.

As the soon to be exception to irrelevancy Instapundit would say, Ouch.

You know, I can understand where the Reverend is coming from. It is a lot of work to post regularly, particularly if you're a thinker and not a linker. It makes sense to want to get some help, get other people on board to cover topics you don't have the time or the energy for. In fact, it makes so much sense, you almost wonder why nobody else ever thought of it.

But somebody else did think of it. They called it a newspaper.

I'm not putting down group blogs by comparing them to newspapers, but what I am saying is that without the rest of the blogosphere, group blogs will be reduced to little more than electronic newspapers, with all their inherent limitations. (The two main ones being lack of space, and lack of deep research. After all, why dig deep into background when you only have a few column inches to deal with?) This is the key error that Reverend Sensing makes.

Yes, most blogs have low readership, but that is nothing new; most of the millions of blogs have always had low readership.

Yes, most of the millions of blogs out there are unknown to most of the rest of the world. Again, that's nothing new.

And yes, many blogs are of interest only to the blogger and his or her friends and family. Occasionally not even them.

But to suggest that these blogs are insignificant, unimportant, and irrelevant simply because of their low readership is wrong, and reveals a tremendous misperception about what makes the blogosphere so unique.

Here's the thing. Picture the blogosphere as a network of computers. Rev. Sensing is looking at the blogosphere like it's an old style mainframe connected to dedicated terminals. The terminals have very limited processing power, and that's mainly used to route traffic back to the mainframe. The mainframe does all the heavy lifting and feeds the information back to the terminal. In this analogy, blogging's big guns are the mainframe, and everybody else is just a terminal. Each terminal is slaved to the mainframe, and worthless without it.

But that's the wrong paradigm.

The blogosphere is more like a network of parallel processors. Each processor may only be able to handle a small part of the computational load, but by operating in parallel, the aggregate becomes much more powerful than the sum of the individual processors. By the same token, each individual blogger may carry only a small portion of the information load, but the research and knowledge bearing capacity of this distributed system is far greater than the old media could ever handle. Remember Memogate? In the space of a few hours, bloggers were able to analyze and discredit the forgeries with a precision and wealth pf detail that the New York Times and CBS couldn't come close to matching.

In this paradigm, most bloggers may appear insignificant most of the time, but without them, the overall performance of the system would be perceptibly degraded. Yeah, a blog bout knitting may seem totally irrelevant unless you knit (I do, by the way) but what if the knitter also happens to be a nuclear plant operator, Navy Vet, health physics technician, technical writer, science writer, and all around knowledgable kind of a guy? Wouldn't it be nice to have all those areas of knowledge connected and available as an active part of the blogosphere?

Because that is the true strength of the blogosphere, and what makes it robust. It's not the big dogs; it's the millions of little ones. Without them, the blogosphere would be just another newspaper.

And who really needs that?

Posted by Rich at May 1, 2006 12:05 AM | TrackBack