Rorschach Test for the Blogosphere

A recent white paper released
by Perseus Development Corp. has the Blogosphere all astir. Last night
I heard it described by one of its authors as "a Rorschach inkblot of
the blogging world." John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine has a rabidly
anti-blog interpretation which has been questioned
by Steve Gilmore of eWeek, among
others.

The Dowbrigade has an observation or two which seem to have escaped
the profundity of the pundits (too obvious, perhaps):

Perseus claims to have polled over 80% of the 5 million blogs it estimates
exist, and Dvorak makes much of the finding that over half of these blogs
are not posting anymore, and that fully 25% were "one day wonders" The Dowbrigade
wonders how many of those were unsuccessful embryonic attempts to start
blogs on buggy or inadequate software and sites. The Dowbrigade News
was our fifth attempt to start a blog, and we have left a trail of electronic
detritus across the ‘Sphere, in sites like blogger.com, Blogspot and
Blog City.

We are responsible for two blogs on the Adam Curry affiliated SchoolBlogs
site which were created to demonstrate to separate classes how easy it
was to do (after numerous unsuccessful attempts which may or may not
count in the Perseus total). Blogging 101 from BloggerCon left three
brand new blogs out there somewhere.  None
of these blogs have been updated since the day they were created.  All
of them presumably were counted by the Perseus study.

Until the free-blog sites position one-click "Delete this Blog" buttons
on all new blogs these rough drafts and prototypes will continue to litter
the landscape.

Dvorak also gloats over what he sees as a sign that even inveterate
bloggers are tiring of the medium:

Meanwhile, the abandonment rate appears to
be eating into well-established blogs: Over 132,000 blogs are abandoned
after a year of constant updating.

We wonder how many of these "abandonments" were the results of success
rather than failure? How many were sites originally set up on blogspot
or other free sites and whose owners eventually reserved domain names
of their own and moved up to the major leagues of blogging? Or like the
Dowbrigade, found a home on a hosted server like blogs.law.harvard.edu?
How many changed names, hosts or service providers, and thus entered
the ranks of "abandoned"?

Finally this:

Perseus thinks that most blogs have an audience of about 12 readers.

This may be true, but it is entirely beside the point. First of all,
if this average takes into account the 50% of blogs which have been "abandoned"
(or never really utilized by their creators) then the average number
of readers of the remaining "real" blogs would be 24.  But
more important if the Blogosphere is ever going to offer a viable alternative
to the Major Media Monopoly is needs to act like a neural network and
a cognitive filter for information which bubbles up from the bottom into
collective consciousness.

The Blogosphere is like a circulatory system for information within
the body politic.  Not
all of the conduits can be or should be arteries.  Some are capillaries,
relatively tiny information streams reaching into every nook and cranny
of both the
physical and virtual worlds, and funneling streams of data onward and
upward, potentially into the very heart and mind of the collective body
politic.

Hopefully, someday whenever a newsworthy event or idea happens there
will be a blogger nearby.  The ideas and information streams which
resonate within whichever corner of the blogging universe they originate
in will be picked up and relayed, by nodes with increasingly high rates
of connectivity and flow.  Information objects which are timely,
informative, uniquely positioned, well-written or aesthetically designed
will float to the top and eventually come to the attention of a significant
proportion of the wired public.

This at least is the Dowbrigade’s vision of how the whole thing could
work out. How quickly and efficiently the Blogosphere could function
as a "news" medium without centralized design and control (anathema to
this paradigm) remain to be
seen. However,
the technology and ethos are spreading like a virus and we believe that
unfolding events will increasingly expose the inadequacy of the conventional
media and the desperate need for an alternative.