I want to pick up a few threads I’ve been collecting and meaning to post about but haven’t had time for till now.
Let’s start with Matthew Klam’s New York Times Magazine cover story on bloggers from a couple of weeks ago. As a group portrait of a handful of high-profile political bloggers it was, I thought, a good read, and reasonably accurate, based on my own impressions of some of the people covered. But this passage jumped out at me and screamed for comment:
“In a recent national survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than two million Americans have their own blog. Most of them, nobody reads. The blogs that succeed … are written in a strong, distinctive, original voice.”
This passage crystallized the fundamental and profound divide between most professional journalists and most bloggers. “Most of them, nobody reads.” Now, even the world’s most neglected, forlorn and unpopular blog has at least one reader — the author. So Klam’s first message to these bloggers is, “You are a nobody.” But in fact most of the millions of not-terribly-well-known blogs on the planet do have a handful of readers: friends, relatives, colleagues, the person who staggered in the door from a Google search and stuck around.
“Everyone’s famous for 15 people.” Not a new concept (here’s a reference from 1998), but still a valuable one. And one that continues to elude most journalists, who can’t lay aside their industry’s yardstick of success long enough to understand what’s happening on the Web today.
For Klam, as for so many of us media pros, “the blogs that succeed” is synonymous with “the blogs that reach a wide audience.” But publishing a blog is a nearly cost-free effort compared with all previous personal-publishing opportunities, and that frees us all to choose different criteria for success: Maybe self-expression is enough. Or opening a conversation with a couple of new friends. Or recording a significant event in one’s life for others to find.
Many of these blogs do not meet the definition of “journalism,” but who is Klam, and who are we, to say that they are not “successes”? Who are we to discount the human significance of untold numbers of personal stories and thoughts and ideas communicated to handfuls of readers — to dismiss this vast dialogue as the chatter of “nobodies”?
(David Weinberger has a similar reaction here.)
Of course there are blogs and bloggers who judge their enterprises according to the traffic yardstick. Steven Levy’s recent Newsweek column even suggested that some bloggers are beginning to become what is known indelicately in the Web industry as “traffic whores”: “The low road is a well-trodden path to big readership.” As some bloggers try to turn their pastime into a business or a livelihood, this is inevitable.
Unlike Levy, though, I’m less worried about the occasional “ankle-biting” blogger who grows hoarse-voiced in hope of page-views — and more impressed by the unflagging explosion of memorable new blogging voices and contributions to the burgeoning pool of human knowledge online.
This is the dark matter of the Web universe, the stuff J.D. Lasica is writing about in his book. Collectively, it outweighs all the “bright” matter of the more commercial Web sites with their vast traffic. This much was known as early as the mid-’90s, when we began to see that, though the top 20 Web sites may have dominated the traffic claimed by the top 100 Web sites, the top 100 Web sites still commanded only a fraction of the Web’s total traffic. This was a new world.
What’s happening today is that, thanks to Google and RSS and other technologies still aborning, that world is beginning to get organized, and as it becomes better organized it can’t help becoming more economically significant.
Here’s where I’d bring in Wired editor Chris Anderson’s now justly celebrated “Long Tail” piece. Anderson takes a look at consumer behavior patterns on Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody, and other “big catalog” services online. These services restore back catalogs and “mid lists”; they restore a nearly infinite number of oldies into circulation. Individually, these works have minuscule demand; collectively, they’re huge:
“Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country. This is the Long Tail.”
People don’t get this yet, Anderson writes: “We assume…that only hits deserve to exist” — just as we assume that if you don’t have a big circulation, “nobody” reads you.
Anderson’s piece focuses chiefly on the entertainment industry, but the principle is a broader one. If you want to keep climbing the ladder from blogs to the entertainment industry all the way up to the global economy, the next piece to read is James Surowiecki’s little essay on “the bottom of the pyramid,” which talks about the vast economic opportunity in creating products for the planet’s teeming billions of poor customers. (“Though developing nations don’t have much money on a per-capita basis, together they control enormous sums.”)
There’s an old saying in the land of the Broadway theater, where once I tarried, that you can’t make a living there, but you can make a killing. Perhaps the Internet’s fate is to transmute the worlds of publishing and entertainment and even global trade from the hit-or-miss nightmare of a Broadway-like lottery into something more hopeful — a world where it’s a lot harder to make a killing but a lot easier to make a living. Is there anyone, outside of a few boardrooms, who’d find that a loss?
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