Jorn “Robot Wisdom” Barger has an interesting “meta” post up about the nature of blogging. As the creator of the term “weblog”, he is claiming it back again for its original definition (“log your websurfing with public annotations”) and asking people to move along and find something else to call diaries, aggregators, and the like.
More seriously (I think), Jorn has some solid commentary about these aggregator sites (and I’m going to screw up his free-verse formatting):
the unit-measure for blogging is the blogger and you subscribe or unsubscribe
to the blogger-as-a-whole based on whether you find them simpatico(i’ve always wished that someone would create a partial duplicate or
RWWL Digest that echoes just my mainstream links)so my main problem with Slashdot is that there’s no ‘them’ there / i just don’t know who’s interested in what and who understands what / so the news-stream it offers remains largely unfocused sludge
and now the Huffington Post, too has become almost unreadable because it aggregates
100 different windbags with no common voice
Related posts:
Paul Graham has a good observation that kinda cross-applies to blogs. In his essay on Web 2.0 (http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html), he says this of Google:
“The web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That’s why their success seems so effortless. They’re sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels.”
The same is true of blogs, i.e. the blogosphere has a ‘certain grain’ too. A good blog is not an aggregator of information — plenty of generic sources for that — it’s a distiller of information. A blog’s ‘brand’ is in the unique perspective and approach of the editor(s) behind it… readers are attracted to a particular set of parsing and sifting skills, packaged with a consistent philosophy / communication style / point of view.
Nicely put, that captures the point very well.
Yes, I think that sums things up well. I would also add that a blog needs to permit comments by readers. One of the strengths of blogs is the ability to have a discussion on a particular topic with give and take. That’s another reason why Huffington etc. leaves much to be desired.