Steve Rubel has posted about "The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging".
Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted – at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again, often with very little value add. It’s almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.
So is this true? Is there really less value in the blogging that’s going on right now? I’m not so sure.
One issue is that the level of noise has increased – there are more bloggers. Therefore, there are more rubbish bloggers, and more crappy blogs. After all, 98% of everything is pretty crud. So that’s a factor. Attention loggers like TechMeme are bound to display large numbers of bloggers regurgitating news, because that is what a lot of bloggers do. That doesn’t mean to say, though, that the quality bloggers aren’t out there, nor that they are in decreasing numbers in real terms.
The other is that many of the best bloggers like to be on the bleeding edge – they like to be early adopters, especially those who blog about tech and web innovation. Quite rightly so: if they weren’t engaging in new technology, we’d be questioning why we bother reading them. Now, one of the trends of recent developments is that stuff is getting smaller, shorter. Twitter is blogging, reduced. Seesmic is YouTube, reduced. If people are playing with these toys, then their output is bound to be reduced. That’s not being lazy, it’s just taking part.
