My prediction is that in niches where the ratio of information value to entertainment value is high, blogs will prove to be superior mechanisms for disseminating news. For example, local politics tends to have lower entertainment value than national politics. To me, that implies that at some point we will start to see elections for school board or city council influenced more by coverage in blogs than by coverage in newspapers.
Here is his description of how the blogosphere works (should work?):
This filtering process makes all of us more efficient. Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold. Everyone tends to receive information with a high value to them, and they avoid having to read information that has low value to them. If the filtering system works well, I get to read lots of economic insights, and I never have to read anything about, say, Olympic figure skating.
Here is my earlier post on how blogs influence the world.
On the “value” of blogs:
(from: http://b2bolivia.blogspot.com/2006/01/assessing-value-of-bolivian-blogs.html )
A Blog is valuable because of its monetary meaning; which originates from the expenses and opportunity costs incurred in creating it. Blogs, as any other product of the human imagination can be appraised and ostensibly traded:
- The final product is intellectual and proprietary
- Provide knowledge, and are a potential source of information
- Blos provide quasi-primary research and consumer information
- Blogs can also be a tool for self-promotion
- A Blog is valuable because of its political and propagandistic uses/potential.
- A Blog is valuable because of its educational potential.
And finally;
- Blogs create networks and connectivity
All of the features I’ve pointed out above would “in the real world† either cost money or provide revenues, and therefore have a real and monetary value.
I believe it is neither a fad nor trend. While I agree with everything Arnold
wrote, I don’t think his economic models of blogging are practical or likely to become wide spread. Also, if blogging were to become very widespread, it would become repetitive and inefficient as well.
I believe blogging is a niche market where compensation is in a large part the personal satisfaction of the blogger. Income from blogging will remain small, and only those who really care about writing blogs will do so. This will help to ensure the quality of content and make the bloggosphere easy to navigate.
In a sense, blogging has always existed. There has always been a vast oversupply of written commentary. What has changed is that, until the Net came along, there was no good way to get the written material to the readers who might actually be interested in it. The only options were to interest a publisher in disseminating it or (if you had the money and the cojones) publishing it yourself. Neither option was nearly as efficient as blogging.
The problem with Spencer’s analysis is it presumes that “news” is the sole product of blogs. That may well be true for himself and others like him. But, for myself, I read blogs because I want to learn particular people’s reaction to the news. That’s something that traditional news outlets just can’t provide — mostly because they don’t employ the particular people involved.
In other words, for me, Spencer is saying something like: Hanging out at political bars like Frank Fat’s in Sacramento, or Manuel’s in Atlanta, has a “free-rider issue”. That’s not it at all. You’re a regular at a place like that because you want to know what the other regulars think.
The overwhelming majority of blogs are written not for economic incentive, but because people like talking to like-minded people. Not only do most people usually not expect to make money doing that, many will pay for the privilege to boot. (Everything from trade shows to social bars to science fiction conventions to annual subscriptions for blogging/journaling sites come to mind.)
It’s the conversation that matters.
It is not only issue of information – it is also a question of a kind “are there some real money there?”
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