Information implosion
“Every event has thousands of commentators all offering a different perspective. Every protest has more photographers than protestors. Every one of us has the chance to be heard.
It can’t go on like this. Only 14 thousand of the 19 million blogs on Bloglines have more than 50 subscribers. It’s cool that everyone can do it, but if no one is listening or no one cares, it becomes self-defeating.
Beyond those with a desire to reach out and show others how great or how creative and interesting they are, are people simply going about the business of documenting their lives. It’s been predicted that every family will need a terabyte of storage in their lifetime to store all their personal media. So they spend their lives recording and storing.
There’s just going to be too much stuff.
We need editors.
Consumer control is fine, but there is just going to be too much stuff to look at and listened to. Doesn’t it get dangerous when Starbucks sees music overload as an opportunity to dictate taste? Even the editors have gone over-choice crazy — how many channels are there on Sirius?
There needs to be a really sophisticated personalization layer that helps find the stuff you should see and hear. Nothing comes even close to this yet; Tivo’s recommendations don’t really work, and even Netflix leaves a lot to be desired. Is anyone doing something interesting in this area that we are missing?”
the state of the blogsphere
“Technorati has just published its latest report on the state of the blogspace, its findings make for interesting reading.
The highlights:
– 19.6 milion blogs
– A blog is created every second
– 8-20% of blogs are splogs or fakes
– 9 posts are created a second
What’s most interesting is that growth in postings per day seems to be in decline. Postings peaked in July with the London bombings at 1.2 million/day, but are now around the 600,000 level. Although Katrina did create an increase in the number of blog posts, this increase has not been sustained and the volume has fallen back.
Blogging is not going away, but it does seem that its explosive growth appears to be slowing down a little”.
