Socially Speaking

The Waxxi ‘cast with Cory Doctorow is up for your listening pleasure. There were more questions coming in via IM/email this time than via phone, which is an interesting dynamic. Cory really delivers an incredible amount of knowledge, thought and sharing in answering one question, never mind dozens. Have a listen.

For those who prefer text, here is another (great) question from the chat, by Diggal:

(1) Why do you think Boing Boing is so popular, and (2) do think online blogs will take over print, TV and other traditional media?

So, Boing Boing I think owes its success to a few factors. One is, we have good taste. I think we pick out neat stuff. That’s cool. I think, though, that there are lots of people who have good taste, and one of the things that we do that goes beyond having good taste, is we are very, very, very explicit in our headlines and our summaries. You can tell from reading a Boing Boing headline exactly what the Boing Boing story is about. You can tell from reading the first sentence, everything that’s in the story. You can tell from reading the whole post, everything you need to know about the link.

And that’s, I think, an enormous advantage over other blogs, which often post things like, “Funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Can’t describe it, just go look.” When you’re looking at 10,000 undifferentiated headlines in your RSS reader, it’s really hard to pay attention to those things. They don’t alphabetize well, they don’t make any sense, as compared to these very, very explicit headlines.

There are other reasons of course. Clay Shirky famously described the power law distribution of blogs. His thesis is that the rich get richer when it comes to inbound links and to attention and traffic. Which is to say, the more links you have pointing at your blog, the more chances there are that any given person will find your blog; the greater the chances that any given person will find your blog, the greater the chances that someone will make a link to your blog; the greater the chances that someone will make a link to your blog, the greater the chances that someone will find your blog. So, in other words, we’ve been around a long time, and that makes us popular, too.

Will blogs take over traditional media? I think the future composts the past. You know, opera wasn’t’ taken over by radio. It might have been overtaken by radio, but it wasn’t taken over by radio. By the same token, I don’t think traditional media will disappear, but I think that the role that it plays will be greatly shifted.

There are certain kinds of stories that you might want to tell, and certain kinds of messages you might want to convey that are just better suited to being discussed and conveyed in a distributed fashion by individual bloggers and small groups of bloggers who have this distributed conversation linked together by services like Technorati, Google Blog Search, trackbacks, and comments that just aren’t as well suited to being distributed and promulgated by big, monolithic broadcast media.