www.josschuurmans.com

The Live Web Will Be Federated

Under the headline 'Blogging 2.0: Moving Toward Conversational "Flows"', Bill French wrote a piece on MyST Blogsite, in which he observes that conversations on the Internet are increasingly moving away from being contained within blogs, towards being distributed among lifestreaming or micro-blogging services (Bill calls them "flow applications") such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.

He quotes me by saying:

"(...) Ironically, in this comment, Jos Schuurmans equate sthe emergence of social networks with the end of “channels”. (...)"

I subscribe to the view that online conversations will be less and less contained within channels, while more and more federated among and across different platforms and services. To the extent that channels can be seen as walled gardens, the emergence of the blogosphere itself was the disruption that started taking down those walls.

The point I was trying to make earlier, under 'The End of Channels?' and ''Channels' does not sufficiently describe the dynamics of distributed online conversations', is that conversations take place across and between channels, not just within, and that it is therefore less useful to think of the Web in terms of channels. As David Weinberger and Doc Searls have pointed out: the Internet is a place, not a medium.

Indeed, enablers like Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Ping.fm, and Facebook are speeding up the trend of conversations being more distributed. But what these services represent most of all is the shift from a more static Web to the "live Web".

Another application worth mentioning in this context is Disqus, an enabler of blog comments federation. If Dave Winer will have his way, something similar is going to happen to micro-blogging as well... And why wouldn't he?

Tags: Bill French, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Dave Winer, lifestreaming, micro-blogging, federation, channels, conversation

Dugg: The Giant Zero, Part 0.x - SuitWatch | Doc Searls / Linux Journal

On October 12, 2006, Doc Searls wrote in Linux Journal how "(...) it helps to think of the Net as a "giant zero" (...)"

(The above video features Doc speaking about the Giant Zero at a Berkman Luncheon Series event on September 19, 2006.)

(Further, here is a podcast on IT Conversations from March 6, 2007, in which Doc talks about the Giant Zero with Phil Windley.)

I was just reading chapter 2 of David Weinberger's 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined - a unified theory of the web', called 'Space', when Doc Searls came out of hospital and the first thing he "cached up" was a link to when he first explained his idea of the Giant Zero in Linux Journal. I thought, if this was the first thing he thought about when climbing back on the saddle, it must be highly relevant.

Together, Doc's notion of a giant vacuum and David's notion of the Web being "place-ial" but not spacial, make a lot of sense. David writes:

p.40 : "(...) We could think of the Web as a giant photocopier that delivers copies of sites. We could think of it as a medium through which we see sites. We could think of it as a library from which we request copies. But we don't. We experience the Web as a web: a set of nodes that are linked one to another, creating a space through which we travel. (...)"

p.45: "(...) While big companies have an advantage when it comes to location because their fatter wallets can buy better positioning, big sites don't have a leg up on being interesting. In fact, often it's quite the contrary. (...)"

p. 50: "(...) in this city, nearness loses its symmetry: my Broadway show room may be near (linked to) your Gershwin room, but your Gershwin room need not be near my room. You may not even know that I've brought my room near to yours by linking to it (...)"

In Linux Journal on October 12, 2006, Doc characterized his Giant Zero in twelve steps:

1. The Net isn't a medium.  It's a place.
2. Distance is the main issue.  Not bandwidth.
3. The vacuum in the middle of the Giant Zero is sustained by light.
4. The Net is pure infrastructure.
5. The Giant Zero is built to support an infinitude of business.
6. The Net is a public utility, like electricity, gas, water, waste treatment and roads.
7. We need to understand The Because Effect, and how it explains the real value of pure infrastructure.
8. The Live Web is branching off the Static Web.
9. On the Live Web, immediacy matters more than mediation.
10. Works of art, good or bad, are not commodities.  Nobody writes (or draws, or shoots, or sculpts) cargo.
11. There's a new economy coming together around The Live Web.
12. In the Live Web economy, the value chain is replaced by the value constellation.  There are only stars here.

Ping this! | read more | digg story

Dugg: PressThink: Migration Point for the Press Tribe | Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen explained on June 26, 2008, why he believes that in the new territory across the digital divide, hybrid forms of journalism, which combine properties of open (amateur) as well as closed (professional) editorial systems, will be the strongest.

(Apology: while I hope this doesn't constitute a breach of "fair use", I struggle to paraphrase Jay's essay in a more compact fashion).

"(...) The First Amendment says to all Americans: you have a right to publish what you know, to say what you think. That right used to be abstractly held. Now it is concretely held because the power to publish has been distributed to the population at large.

(...) The land that newsroom people have been living on—also called their business model—no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.

(...) And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life, and which parts were well adapted to the old world but may be unnecessary or a handicap in the new. (...) This creates an immediate crisis for the elders of the tribe, who have always known how to live.

(...) Today, the press is shared territory. It has pro and amateur zones. (...) Part of it is a closed system—and closed systems are good at enforcing editorial controls—the other part is an open system.

(...) Open systems are good at participation, community formation, and locating intelligence anywhere in the network. They are good at sharing, and getting good at surfacing the good stuff. The two editorial systems don’t work the same way. One does not replace the other. They are not enemies, either. We need to understand a lot better how they can work together.

(...) And that is where the idea of pro-am journalism comes from. I think the hybrid forms will be the strongest—openness with some controls, amateurs with some pros—but that means we have to figure out how these hybrid forms work. (...)"

read more | digg story

Mobile Internet sucks (= conclusion of 3 wks without ADSL)

I've been without broadband Internet at home for about three weeks - I was "between providers", so to speak.

Must say that, while I was still able to consume some of my daily Internet fix - browsing RSS feeds on my mobile phone -, it was at the same time a sobering experience of how embarrassingly ill adapted the applications on my Nokia N95 are to mobile Web 2.0 participation.

I'll probably remember this period best as the time when Doc Searls went in and out of hospital and blogged  it all. Good health and happiness to you, Doc!

Data speed is not the bottle neck. It's the lack of mobile client-side participatory software.

With my Nseries device and 3G coverage I could browse and email, but that was about it. No tagging, no digging, no blogging with any level of convenience.

So what I ended up doing was to bookmark the URLs I would have liked to tag, digg or blog and thus collect them in my mobile phone's browser for future reference.

I hope to catch up blogging some of those bookmarks over the coming days.

Dugg: Craigslist's unorthodox path | The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe ran a background piece about Craig Newmark of Craigslist' fame (Wikipedia: Craigslist).

"(...) Newmark, who is customer service representative and founder of Craigslist Inc., didn't start the website as a business, but it has grown into an utterly unusual one. (...)"

"(...) Peter Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence (...) says Craigslist is a for-profit business "run like a nonprofit."

(...) "There's nothing noble or altruistic or pious about what we're doing," [Craig] says. "Once you make enough money and provide for your future, it's more satisfying to change the world a little bit." (...)"

On journalism:

"(...) "Has Craigslist caused newspapers pain? Yes. It's called capitalism," Zollman says. "They came along with a better mousetrap, and people started using it."

Newmark is personally interested in exploring the potential for the Internet to support new kinds of journalism, whether produced by professional investigative reporters or amateurs. "We need investigative reporters to ask tough questions," he says.

Among the organizations he supplies with moral or financial support are the Sunlight Foundation, which aims to improve access to congressional information; NewAssignment.net, which promotes "open source" reporting; and ProPublica, which is building a team of investigative journalists. (...)"

(Via David Weinberger)

read more | digg story

Dugg: Introduction to 'Holding On to Reality' | Albert Borgmann

The introduction to
Holding On to Reality
The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium
by Albert Borgmann

"(...) Without information about reality, without reports and records, the reach of experience quickly trails off into the shadows of ignorance and forgetfulness.

(...) As a report is the paradigm of information about reality, so a recipe is the model of information for reality, instruction for making bread or wine or French onion soup.

(...) technological information lifts both the illumination and the transformation of reality to another level of lucidity and power. But it also introduces a new kind of information. To information about and for reality it adds information as reality. The paradigms of report and recipe are succeeded by the paradigm of the recording.

(...) technological information is the most prominent layer of the contemporary cultural landscape, and increasingly it is more of a flood than a layer, a deluge that threatens to erode, suspend, and dissolve its predecessors. (...)"

(Via David Weinberger, who remarks: "(...) a work about information, the Net, and philosophy, published in 1999. It’s terrific. (...)" )

read more | digg story

Dugg: Who is Who: Interview with David Weinberger | Ulrike Reinhard

Via David Weinberger:

"(...) Ulrike Reinhard, of WhoIsWho, video-interviewed me on our back porch last week. She asked me about the need for serendipity, what an “open” Internet means, the costs of social networks, the new sense of privacy, user-controlled identity systems, Web 3.0, market conversations, categorization and control, Twitter, Obama… (...)"

Serendipity is a fascinating concept. I strongly believe that the way we learn new things and expand our horizons is through serendipity. In order to discover and, if you will, accept something new, this "news" needs to be presented to us in a familiar, trusted, i.e. "old" context.

We hardly ever buy into something entirely unfamiliar. For example, if we don't know the source, we are less prone to trust the news. In conversations, I am more likely to learn something new from people with whom I have, say, 80 percent in common, than from people with whom I have, say, 10 percent in common. If you get my drift...

read more | digg story

Dugg: The Internet Organizes Itself: Here Comes Everybody | Glenn Fleishman

"(...) Clay Shirky's (...) book "Here Comes Everybody" (The Penguin Press, 2008) explains his views on the power of individuals to organize into groups without companies, hierarchies, or outside efforts. (...)"

Glenn Fleishman writes:

"(...) I sat down with Clay on 14-Mar-08 to talk about the book for a short article that appeared in the Seattle Times, focused on the business side of his book. However, the Seattle Times allowed me to publish a podcast of our roughly 40-minute conversation. (...)"

The 40-minute podcast is indeed worth the listen. Clay talks about a lot of stuff, including the notion that we don't yet understand where the Internet will be taking us. And another thing I found quite interesting was his reference to "more is different", i.e. scale changes the nature of things (such as the Internet).

(via Charlie Schick, who adds on a personal note:

"(...) My tongue is bleeding, I am biting it so hard. Though a beer can loosen it, in case you are interesting in a tale of enlightenment, abandonment, discovery, creativity, stealing, cluelessness, and dissapointment. (...)"

Charlie, what's your favorite beer? Come visit and I'll put it cold for you.

read more | digg story

Dugg: Video-interview of Rupert Murdoch | Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher / D6

"(...) video highlights from the first part of the D6 interview of Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO, News Corporation, conducted by conference co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. (...)"



(part 1 - 07:00 minutes)

Asked by Mossberg if newspapers have much of a future left, Murdoch says:

"(...) Over the last 10 or 15 years they've made every economy possible in production, with computers and so on, but not in journalism. Now they have to turn to journalism.

(...) Every story in the (...) [Wall Street] Journal currently is, on average, touched or edited by eight different people. That is ridiculous. (...)"

(part 2 - 6:15 minutes)

read more | digg story

Dugg: Dan Gillmor: Principles of a New Media Literacy | Publius Project

"(...) In this emergent global conversation, which has created a tsunami of information, what can we trust?

How we govern ourselves on the Web depends in significant ways on the answers. To get this right, we’ll have to re-think, or at least re-apply, some older cultural norms in distinctly modern ways.

It comes down, in significant ways, to some principles, both for media consumers and creators. They add up to a 21st Century notion of what we once called “media literacy.” But media literacy has generally lacked the kind of participatory piece that is so essentially a part of digital media. (...)

• Be skeptical of absolutely everything.
• But don’t be equally skeptical of everything.
• Understand and learn media techniques.
• Ask more questions.

(...)"

read more | digg story

Blood from stone: Don't focus on ad revenue from social networking services | Charlie Schick

Charlie writes: "(...) Your core service drives the interaction with the customer, but the money can come from some other area.

But, be careful where you _think_ you can get the money. (...) Online social networking services thrive because they are a form of social lubrication. (...) Yes, social network is the concentrator, but what the folks end up doing is where the money's at. (...)"

Interesting comment from Stefan Constantinescu: "(...) recommendation engine may sound unsexy now, but they will LEAD the next generation of corporate buy outs and be the foundation for the services we use in the upcoming decade. (...)"

read more | digg story

Dugg: Blogging as a Form of Journalism | J.D. Lasica / OJR

"(...) Weblogs offer a vital, creative outlet for alternative voices (...)"

When cleaning up my paper (sic!) archive the other day, I came across a printed article in two parts, by J.D. Lasica for the Online Journalism Review (OJR), published on May 24 and 31, 2001. Just before I'm throwing this away for the benefit of the paperless office, I'll quote what I highlighted back then:

From: 'Blogging as a Form of Journalism', May 24, 2001:

'Channels' does not sufficiently describe the dynamics of distributed online conversations

Interesting conversation about "channels" developing here with Bill French.

Totallly agree that people create channels in efforts to create order from chaos. The way I used "channels" in my post on 'The End of Channels?' was with the traditional notion of, if you will, media titles, in mind: TV/radio channels or shows, zines, newspapers, websites, blogs, forums...

I suppose what they have in common is that they all have a name, an address, and usually a more or less defined scope. They are often furnished with editorial policies and they may be designed to further particular political or commercial interests. Also, most often they have a brand identity.

But if we look passed the keeper of the gate and over the garden wall, I am willing to accept that channels - as in "meta-handlers" - are not necessarily disappearing, but rather evolving into new forms, such as distributed conversations connected by tags.

The point I am trying to make is that old-style channels are designed to contain conversations within them. Sure, they are helpful as meta-handlers in creating order. And, agreed, the new meta-handlers are facilitated by social media, e.g. through tags. However, I hesitate to go as far as to call those tag-connected (micro-content contributions to) conversations, ehm, "channels".

In Dutch, we use the same word for channel and canal: "kanaal". So it won't surprise you that I quite strongly associate the word channel with a human-made, one-directional, controlled flow.

Bill writes:

"(...) People tend to prefer the benefits that channels provide - they create the notion of a "meta-handle" that makes it easier for them to understand, know about, and share. (...)"

Well, I won't deny that people find channels convenient. Still, to me, even "virtual channel" or "conversation channel" doesn't quite sufficiently express the dynamic nature of distributed online conversations. These conversations do not have ONE name, ONE address or even a defined scope.

Tags are useful in searching and navigating these conversations, - in particular because they add social filtering to the mix - and "tag cloud" is a metaphor that helps people venture into the Web 2.0 era.

And yet, even tag clouds cannot contain or accurately scope conversations. The Web, and in particular the social media web, makes our culture and economy more "probabilistic", as Chris Anderson puts it in The Long Tail.

So, why not liberate the conversations from their channels and simply call them "conversations"?

(See also: 'www.josschuurmans.com: 'The concept of "conversation" as in the Long Tail of Conversations')

Dugg: Andrew Keen is the Anti-Chris

In this podcast Moira Gunn speaks with author Andrew Keen, who claims that today's Internet is killing our culture. With descriptions like "dystopia", "Orwellian nightmare", and "tyranny of the amateurs", Keen explicitly disagrees with Chris Anderson on the virtues of the Long Tail and the abundance of free content.

Anderson's more optimistic views on emerging economies of abundance and the business of "free" are well captured in another podcast on IT Conversations from June 2007, as well as in his keynote at the Nokia World event in Amsterdam, in December 2007 (which I blogged about earlier today).

Keen describes Web 2.0 as a stage in the development of the Internet in which businesses attempt to build revenue models around user-generated content, whereas during Web 1.0 businesses explored the Internet as a new distribution channel for their existing, professionally produced content.

read more | digg story

Dugg: Chris Anderson: 'Free' | Nokia World 2007

(streaming video and downloadable .mp3)

At the Nokia World event in Amsterdam in December 2007, Chris Anderson discussed themes from his upcoming book, 'Free', in which he argues that when the price of production and distribution of (digital) content (and services) approaches zero, you might as well treat it as if it were free, and sell something else.

Open your mind to create new business models around "free", in an economy of abundance.

We are entering a world in which every way that content (and even physical products) can be created, WILL be tried, because it costs next to nothing to do so.

The old scarcities are: time + money. The new scarcities are: time + money + attention + reputation.

When working with Intel, Chris tells, they did a thought experiment. What about, instead of selling hardware and software as 1+1, selling it perhaps as 0+2?

Is Chris suggesting that Nokia should give its devices away for free in order to sell MORE services?
Could and should we move from selling hardware+software as 1+1, towards 0+morethan2?

To put it more urgently: is this the ONLY way to go?

read more | digg story

Lifeblog is a blogging application!

Yes it is, Ivan! :-)

Granted, Nokia Lifeblog is foremost an attempt at a memory prosthesis, as Christian Lindholm explained in that interview before the launch of the beta version in 2004.

Gordon Bell is making a more thorough attempt, albeit one that would be unpractical for the Nokia Multimedia Business Group's target customers at this stage. But don't worry, we'll get there. (See also Wikipedia: "lifelog")

The content you consciously capture (photos, video, sound, text) is part of that extended memory, as is the context information which mobile devices will be able to capture for you in the background. Both consciously created or selected content and less consciously captured context are part of our human memory, so the metaphor still applies.

As you mention, Ivan, content and contextual information is not all that valuable unless it can be searched. True, or, to put it in somewhat broader terms: real value is derived from all that information only when you start using it.

Now, this is where the onions come in.

Huh?

Trust your life to a piece of Nokia

The following text is a condensed version of an article published on Nokia's intranet (restricted access) on March 11, 2004. I've omitted part of the original text for reasons of company confidentiality and the confidentiality of interviewees.

[STARTS]

Trust your life to a piece of Nokia

By Jos Schuurmans March 11, 2004, 16:00

HELSINKI, Finland. -- A dozen brains at NVO Multimedia Applications in Ruoholahti have combined their visions of mobility, their entrepreneurial spirit, technological expertise and marketing skill to work on... the "memory prosthesis".

Well, sure, there you have an exaggerated metaphor. No external device is likely to replace the human brain any time soon. But the larger idea certainly holds water and the first tangible result of their efforts will be version 1.0 of Lifeblog, a preview of which will be shown at the CeBIT fair in Hanover, Germany, next week.

NVO Multimedia Applications team's Director Christian Lindholm has been pushing the case for usability within Nokia for a long time. He invented the Navi-key and has, more recently, been standing at the crib of the Series 60 platform, which he is now actively promoting and developing.

The End of Channels?

Summary: The two aspects of social media that I'd like to view as qualitative departures from the past are: (1) 'The Dilution of Channels' in that online conversations happen all over the place; and (2) 'The Wisdom of the Crowd', social software helping people navigate their way through online conversations.

[ADDITION, October 26, 2007: I've added one more charasteristic to the social media mix: (3) 'Participation'. See also the addition towards the end of this post]

My local professional communicators' association wishes to pick my brain on "social media". So it's about time I captured the concept in writing.

The media have, of course, always been "social". Any form of human communication (where there are messages sent by senders and processed by receivers) is social. The Internet is a disruptive technology that accelerates certain properties of everything social, in particular human communication, including what we call "the media". In other words, to some extent "social media" is a pleonasm.

Also the Internet has always been a social space.

For homework I Googled the term. The Wikipedia entry, Robert Scoble's entry, and some other references I found seem to position "social media" mainly as something that has more "capacity" than "traditional media": online means faster and more immediate, easier to interact with, easy to copy and share, unlimited space...

Quantitative or qualitative?

Are we really talking about quantitative differences only? Or should we make some qualitative distinctions as well?

The concept of "conversation" as in the Long Tail of Conversations

I'm preparing to have a conversation (okay, a presentation) at the MindTrek 2007 Conference in Tampere, Finland, early October. My topic is to do with the Long Tail of Conversations, and how we might connect people to the conversations across the Long Tail distribution graph that matter most to them.

(I was kinda getting there in one of my previous posts: 'Look at the Long Tail for the highest-value conversations'.)

When I submitted my draft conversation (ok, yes, presentation), one of the organizers asked me to elaborate on my understanding of the concept of "conversation". That was really good feedback, because it caused me to realize that I was using the term in different ways for different purposes, and it forced me to think about defining them better.

So here we go, sketchy at best:

Look at the Long Tail for the highest-value conversations

Excerpt: Where do you think creativity and innovation is born? And where do you think that the best-match conversations about the things you are interested in are taking place? The answer is: in Long Tail conversations!

[UPDATE, July 29, 2007: Whoa, I just noticed on Technorati that it's Doc Searls' birthday today. Happy "round" birthday, Doc! (I just celebrated my 40th on 070707)]

Not perfectly sure how and why Doc Searls associates my excerpts from the Cluetrain Manifesto with Ben Peters' talk about close reading of text (particularly since I haven't heard Ben's talk), but I hope he means he can see that I've read the cluetrain closely  :-)

Doc: "1) I haven't read the book in years;"

I was somewhat suprised to read that, although surely the contents of the book are so much part of Doc's being that in practice, he may never really feel the need to go back and look things up. (I do.)

The Cluetrain Manifesto on the rebirth of conversations

IMHO, the Cluetrain Manifesto is still the most visionary book, indeed a feast of recognition, of how the Internet is accelerating the shift from broadcast to search, from push to pull, from controlled messaging to open conversation.

From where I stand, the three most relevant themes in the Cluetrain are:

1. The significance of conversations, and how the Internet is bringing them back.
2. Why and how businesses need to change as a result.
3. The power of storytelling.

Below is my collection of references from the book, with an emphasis on the first theme, the rebirth of conversations.

[UPDATE, July 29, 2007: Doc Searls refers to my excerpts from the cluetrain on The Doc Searls Weblog:  Saturday, July 28, 2007. In response, I submit that we should combine the teachings of the Cluetrain and the Long Tail theory to be able to engage in the conversations that matter most to us.]

Dugg: The porous membrane: why corporate blogging works | gapingvoid

In a very simple and elegant fashion, Hugh MacLeod zooms in on one of the core themes of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

He explains in 15 points how and why a more porous membrane between its internal and external conversation will make it easier for a corporation to align itself with its market.

NOTE TO HUGH: Hugh, I hope you don't mind I copied your diagram above :-)

read more | digg story

Oma tv-kanava Etelä-Savoon?

Mikkelin ammattikorkeakoulu tutkii toimeksiannosta mahdollisuuksia alueellisen tv-kanavan l ähetysten aloittamiseen Etelä-Savon alueella (Mikkeli - Pieksämäki - Savonlinna). Tämän kyselyn avulla haluammekin selvittää kotitalouksien suhtautumista ja kiinnostuneisuutta alueelliseen tv-kanavaan.

read more | digg story

We need to learn to let go!

The five-member team I work with (we develop and content-manage internal news and participatory media channels) have decided to (re-)read the Cluetrain book over the summer and discuss it when we're all back at the office.

A colleague from another team the other day requested ideas as to whom we could invite to speak at our yearly global corporate communications days. (The name Andrew Keen came up.)

Even though things have moved on since 1999, to me the Cluetrain is still the most visionary book, indeed a feast of recognition, of how the Internet is accelerating the shift from broadcast to search, from push to pull, from controlled messaging to open conversation.

Many corporate communicators, I feel, are still struggling with the concept, clinging on to an illusion of "controlled conversation" or some such compromise. Well, it won't last, will it? And the sooner we all grok this, the better for all involved: WE NEED TO LEARN TO LET GO!

If I had to suggest a speaker to our communications teams, I'd be humbled should any of the four Cluetrain authors be willing. Perhaps the chapters that spoke to me most were those written by Christopher Locke and David Weinberger.

David Sifry's top-one-percent 'Magic Middle'

I suppose Technorati is mainly concerned with the metrics and search side of all things Blogosphere. Technorati helps people find information, rather then helping them create blog content or get their voices heard in Blogosphere conversations.

Still, In the second part of his 'State of the Blogosphere' (part 1 here), Technorati's founder and CEO David Sifry briefly touches upon the challenges that individual bloggers may have in attracting attention. What he offers, really, is nothing less than... hope :-P

He basically pep-talks people into blogging, offering the perspective of becoming part of 'The Magic Middle'. That's Technorati speak for the realm of 155,000 bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. By publishing regularly and with consistent quality, this is an achievable goal for many bloggers, David seems to suggest.

Well, it feels like a bit of a Catch 22, doesn't it? The Magic Middle makes up about 1.1 percent of those 13.7 million blogs that we could call "alive" (since 13.5 million blogs out of the total 27.2 blogs that Technorati tracks have been dead for at least three months).

Something tells me that, if enough average bloggers reach the 20-links benchmark, it will be lifted in order to keep the Magic Middle at around one percent of the blog population.

Still, David gives us two straws to clutch at. First, there is a particular quality to The Magic Middle:

"(...) "The Magic Middle" of the attention curve, highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche, like Chocolate and Zucchini on food, Wi-fi Net News on Wireless networking, TechCrunch on Internet Companies, Blogging Baby on parenting, Yarn Harlot on knitting, or Stereogum on music - these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing. (...)"

Translation: it's worth trying to get there.

The second argument is that, although - yes - network effects and a power law relationship do exist in the Blogosphere, the importance of these mechanisms should not be overestimated:

"(...) There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content. (...)"

"(...) [T]he number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak. (...)"

Funny thing is, as it happens, I'm not so worried about the amount of attention to my blog. I'm more concerned with the quality of the attention. The way the Blogosphere should really work is that, if your blog entry adds value to a particular conversation, it should surface in that conversation. So it's not about your position on the head or the tail; it's about whether the Long Tail works as it is supposed to.

If your contribution adds value to the conversation and, as a result, the whole conversation moves a little further up the tail and towards the head, then that may be a nice by-product. But for many niche conversations, even this will not be the most pressing objective.

The most promising technology is technology that helps The Long Tail function.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, David Sifry, Long Tail, Magic Middle, Blogosphere, authority