Blogosphere 2.0: Why it ain’t what it used to be.
Norms and practices. Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to. It’s a lot of work to look for good posts elsewhere, and most bloggers have become burnt out. Drezner and Farrell had a theory that even small potato bloggers would have their day in the sun, if they wrote something so great that it garnered the attention of the big guys. But the big guys are too burnt out to find the hidden gems. So, good stuff is being written all the time, and it isn’t bubbling to the top.
Many have stopped using blogrolls, which means less love spread around the blogosphere. The politics of who should be on a blogroll was too much of a pain, so bloggers just deleted the whole thing.
razib 4:46 pm on July 3, 2009 Permalink |
lots of truth to this stuff. though linking was always more of an issue for political weblogs. science weblogs had a tendency to engage a lot more with primary research as opposed to each other.
bingregory 6:36 pm on July 3, 2009 Permalink |
it’s true that blogrolls seem to have died, which is a problem for finding new stuff. But it isn’t that people aren’t reading other blogs, they’re just doing it through feed readers. Solution: put a “shared item” widget on your blog, so as you read, you can tag stuff you find worthwhile. It’s better than a blogroll because It’s always fresh stuff, and it’s better than a standard feed pull because you choose what to display there as you do your daily reading. I’m sure this is hardly a new or original idea, but if anyone is curious what I’m talking about, check out the bottom-most section of my blog’s sidebar.
Admin 8:33 pm on July 3, 2009 Permalink |
in a nutshell, Talk Islam was created to address this problem. We have inverted the usual group blog structure – we have way more frontpagers, all looking out for good stuff, than we do regular commentors. Ive found this to be an essential place to get my daily briefing and good reading material.
also, feed readers are dying too. Piping it thru twitter is the better solution – the @talkislam account’s growth has been utterly insane.