Blogging A Waste of Time? An Economic Perspective.
Yikes! It’s been a whole week since I found Kami’s post about Dee Rambeau’s posts about why he was quitting blogging. I read Kami, read some comments, followed some links, and started posting.
7,000 words later, I saw I was writing something I could never permit to be a post on my blog. It has become an e-book, the link to which is at the bottom of this post.
Here’s what happened. Dee Rambeau posted to his blog that he was done blogging. Says it’s a waste of time. Says the blogosphere is getting noisier, the quality of content going down.
There’s been a bit of reaction and some overreaction to Dee’s posts, both the one I just cited and the one he left on Marcom Blog, the blog of those communications students at Auburn.
What I didn’t hear is anybody really talking about the time economics of blogging. I hear this and that about the ROI, or lack of same, for corporations that blog. But the simple, personal economics of time spent blogging, I’ve heard nobody discussing that.
So I thought about it myself. I realized that entering the blogosphere is a little like entering Second Life. You trade in some real world currency for the coin of the realm you’re entering. In the blogosphere, that coin is the link, but links aren’t identical in value.
So I’ve invented a unit of link value, which I call the scoble, and I set out to work with it.
I adduce some theoretical reasons why the economics of blogging might well be deteriorating. Dee Rambeau might be the canary in the coal mine (although in the essay, I didn’t mention a canary. I did use M. Python’s dead parrot.)
The mini-book I wrote is rather light-hearted—I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’ve got blogging all scienced out. I made some feeble efforts at humor because the picture I painted was in some ways kinda dismal. (I was, after all, dabbling at the Dismal Science.)
All is not gloom, however. In the end I make some concrete suggestions for improving blogging’s future. Now that I’ve written it, I realize what I thought was a major software product design is in fact just a tweak to what Technorati and Google already have. Google could implement what I suggest in a weekend. I hope they do!
Final note. The e-book is link-free. The links that would have been in it if it had remained a blog post will all be in my next post.
Here’s the book: Unfashionably Late: Why Every Book About Blogging Written Before 2009 Is Already Obsolete (Except for this one, I give this one three weeks.) Enjoy.