Out of the Blogosphere: The End of the Information Consumer

by Stowe Boyd, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

The world of the blogosphere, based on the key elements of the Web and the machinery of blogs, is a rich and intensely social place. While broadcast media is based on a one-to-many dynamic, where the organization publishing pushes "content" to an "audience," the user experience of reading blogs is many to many, much more like hanging out at a noisy dinner party than watching television.

Blogs invite participation; it is built into the wiring of blogs. A reader of a blog post is generally informed of the number of comments involved and can readily enter a comment. Most bloggers are avid blog readers, and much of the give and take of blog writing is a call-and-response style of writing: I see that someone has written something that I strongly agree/disagree with, and I chime in with my two cents. This can relatively quickly (in some cases nearly instantaneously) lead to my counterpart responding back to my thoughts or to others who are reading the thread of our discussion jumping in.

Over time, the power laws enter in. Those blogs that have attracted the greatest "popularity," as measured by links, will be most likely to gain more popularity tomorrow -- more links -- all things being equal.

The blogosphere is a complex and enigmatic place. The power laws seem to infer a natural hierarchy of influence: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But even while there is a clear exponential distribution of influence, there is a constant shifting of influence, and new aspirants appear all the time, some of them going from nowhere to influential in a relatively short period of time. As mentioned earlier, TechCrunch, Michael Arrington's astonishingly successful blog on Web 2.0, came on the scene and grew to a top-100 blog (as measured by Technorati) in less than a year. So, the way things work means that upstarts can appear and become extremely popular in short order and that even those with established credentials can be pushed down in influence.

With the exception of the leading 10,000 blogs (to use an arbitrary number), which are increasing less like the rest of the blogosphere in their dynamics and more like some new kind of media player, the scale of participation and commenting on blogs is more like hanging out in a neighborhood bar than attending a major conference. The typical blogger is not going to make a fortune in advertising, be called by the Wall Street Journal for observations on the market, or become famous for his or her writing. However, bloggers may very well find themselves involved in a rich social dynamic, with dozens of contacts reading what they say and leaving comments and with the bloggers themselves in turn doing the same with their own network of friends and family.

And all the while, all readers can participate. There are several thousand people who have submitted comments or trackbacks to my blog in the past year, and, therefore, their thoughts are being read by others coming to my blog. For some, that experience may be the greatest exposure their thoughts have had, and the give and take that they experience in a comment thread on someone else's blog may be a truly rich and rewarding one.

Many bloggers are seduced into blogging by the heady atmosphere of lively conversation. They start with a single comment and inevitably add more a few days later, thus leaving behind the status of lurker, or the 80% that don't participate and merely watch. They then have an argument or a backslapping violent agreement with some person or group of people in a comment thread. They might stumble upon Digg or some other swarm technology, where they can rate posts. They might begin to use an RSS reader to keep up with their favorite authors. At work, someone might introduce them to a solution like Basecamp, a social project management solution with blogging forming its primary axis of interaction. And then, one day, they tip over, and the active participant becomes a blogger. They sign up for Blogger, or TypePad, or MSN Spaces, and off they go. And they e-mail their 20 closest buddies about it.

When blogging operates on this human scale -- where the typical reader is someone well known to you and where the human connection is just as important as the topic being discussed -- blogging seems more of an adjunct to social networking than a platform for publishing. And, in fact, many successful social networking solutions have incorporated the entire blogging experience as one critical part of online socializing. Flickr, ostensibly a digital photo sharing site, is a rich social networking solution, incorporating blogging within it, where the central discussion thread is based on what is captured in photos. Likewise, Last.fm (www.last.fm) includes blogging within a solution dedicated to the sharing of and discovery of music. We can expect that all (or nearly all) successful social networks of the future will include blogging within their DNA, or perhaps fail for not doing so.

This growing social matrix of thoughts presented, comments offered, and interchange fostered now transcends explicit and dedicated solutions like my TypePad blog. The ethos and aesthetics of blogging have permeated every nook and cranny of the Web and are now changing the world of media and the world of business.

Once individuals have experienced the vibrant, perhaps contentious, and definitely social work of the blogosphere -- once they gain a sense of the difference of active participation in conversational media contrasted with passive involvement in broadcast media -- they are unlikely to go back. The old experience is too limiting, too unfulfilling, and too extrinsically controlled. And the shift of millions of former information consumers to active participants in a matrix of social media has enormous repercussions, literally changing the world of media, marketing, and, then, everything else.

-- Stowe Boyd, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium