from scoble to scope: the future of blogging
After some time away from it, I can now go back to Unfashionably Late and see just what is in there.
The summary:
Is blogging a waste of time? This can only be answered if you know what return on time you want to get. Simplifying greatly, I suggest that in the blogosphere, the coin of the realm is the link. But since not all links are equally valuable, I introduce a unit of link quality, the “scoble”, defined as the average value of a link to your blog from Scobelizer. (A link from a newbie might be worth 0.001 scobles, and a link from Huffinton perhaps 4.2 scobles.)
I suggest some reasons why the economics of blogging may be deteriorating. Put in my economics-of-blogging terms, it may be that, as the blogosphere grows, it takes more hours to earn a scoble than in the past. Possible reasons:
- It costs more time to get a top blogger’s attention. Why? Top bloggers are very busy being top bloggers.
- It costs more to enter the game at all. Just to be perceived as a good blogger, one needs to shore up one’s position in sixteen skills.
- It costs more because there’s a lot being written, but of decreasing quality, so that one spends more time finding the conversations that are worth entering.
- It gets more stressful as the sphere gets crasser, cruder, and uglier as it matures.
- The cost of entering the game is not just skills, but learning. And learning blogging gets more complex as time goes on. I cite online lists (which aren’t even complete) of 16 blogging software offerings, 63 aggregators, and 19 podcatchers the newbie can try out. Then one has to learn about tagging, blog searching, and other tools. Then one has to learn a mess of concepts, manners and mores, gossip and argot. Blogging has come to cost a lot of overhead in addition to just reading blogs and writing posts.
- If one seeks links from non-top bloggers, there are too many bloggers out there who have no clue, and you can waste a lot of time on these.
Next, I suggest that in some respects, the new and small blogosphere of 2002 (when I first blogged) was a healthier environment and can be partially reproduced. I begin with the blogging education that Robert French is giving his communications students at Auburn U., and suggest several ways of turning that semi-closed environment into a “blog academy” which can train new bloggers without overwhelming them, and can get them some readership at the same time.
Finally, I suggest that a tool is needed, a telescope by which we can identify good bloggers (since there are so many dreadful ones out there.) I suggest the following metrics:
- Reciprocity of linking (does the blogger reciprocate a reasonable percentage of links?)
- Reciprocity of linking to newcomers (Is this blog helping newer bloggers?)
- Serendipity (does this blogger turn up new stuff?)
Technorati or Google could implement these in a weekend. (My money’s on Google to do it.)
There are a few other traits that tend to belong to good bloggers: they use real names, accept comments in which links are permitted, and deploy only enough snarkiness to have a nice edge, not so much that their posts just amount to name-calling.
Finally, I challenge somebody, anybody, to make some of these things happen, and restore some of the beauty of 2002, when I met Radio Userland and fell in love.
That’s Unfashionably Late in a nutshell, sans pretty pictures, amusing anecdotes, and the all-important reminder to breathe. These SparkNotes should help you pass next week’s quiz, but I do hope some of you will sit down and read the book itself.