Blog Collectives

Yesterday I went a meeting of the Berkeley Entrepreneur's Forum. The theme of the evening was the state of the Venture Capital industry. I'm into that kind of thing, so I found it interesting, but that's not what this post is about. At one point one of the panelists was talking about trends and hype, and he mentioned blogs, followed a fairly matter of fact statement that everyone thought blogs would just grow and grow, but it turns out that while lots of people start blogs, few keep them up, so now blogs pretty much have "come and gone". In his world, he meant that they have come and gone as an exciting market opportunity to exploit, but the sentiment really struck me.

As any reader of this blog knows, I'm a big believer in the personal publishing revolution that is best represented today by the blogging phenomenon. So, it's mildly disturbing to hear the entire trend dismissed, as if it's a thing of the past. I say mildly because part of the point of personal publishing is that getting permission or support from large institutions (or even small ones for that matter) isn't really that important, so long as the web remains fairly open with low barriers to entry (and, thankfully, that is still the way it is). The fact that a venture capitalist doesn't see a way to make a 10x investment is hardly reason to worry about the health of blogging.

At the same, though, I have noticed what I would call blog fatigue starting to set in on many blogs. If we take the "A-List" bloggers out of the discussion for the moment (since most of them are professional journalists/writers/etc., and most of them have built-in economic/career incentives that drive their continued blogging), there's no denying that keeping up a blog is hard work. As I posited earlier this week, quantity is sometimes more important that quality to continue to attract visitors to a blog, but if quality slips you'll definitely lose people (whether a bloggers goal is really to attract and retain readers is another topic for another time). Bottom line: writing reasonably interesting things on a daily basis can be a lot of work -- time that most people don't really have in their lives, especially not when sustained over the course of many years, day in and day out. Thus, blog fatigue -- the gradual decrease in frequency of blog posts, followed in many cases with the eventual abandonment of the blog altogether. At this point there are probably more orphaned blogs sitting on the web than there are active blogs (or, at least, it's moving that way quickly).

Lately I've been thinking about the notion of a blog collective -- a blog created by a group of people, thus alleviating the pressure on every blogger to create something worthwhile every day (or almost every day). Of course, this is hardly a new concept. Plenty of blogs out there have multiple authors -- even this very blog you are reading now has, in theory, at least 3 different authors (though, I haven't done a very good job of maintaining the collective nature of this blog, admittedly). I have to think the trend towards such collective blogs will continue, as people gather together to blog on certain topics in order to spread the effort (and, hopefully, increase the average quality). It's easier to see the utility of such collectives for blogs on fairly narrow topics. For instance, the (mostly excellent) blogs at Corante are group authored. For personal blogs, though, I think it's harder because of the highly personal nature of such blogs. An anecdotal example of this is the attempt by my friends Doug and Jim, who started their blogging lives with a single, co-authored blog. That lasted approximately a week before they decided it would be best to simply pursue independent blogs. I won't claim to speak for them in terms of the reasons, but from the outside looking in it does seem that the personal nature of a blog made it difficult to share the spotlight, so to speak. Whenever I talk to someone about the blogging phenomenon I often mention Doug and Jim's blogs (along with several others written by friends) because for me they are a big part of my blog reading, yet they are decidedly fringe in the grand scheme of the blog world -- and that's part of the point of blogging: for everyone, it's the so-called fringe blogs that are, for a given person, actually central to their media intake on a given day. This is different from simply "small mass media" -- it means that for someone like me, a non-trivial percent of my media intake comes in the form of a personalized view of the world from people I know personally (and from people I'll never meet), and that is different in both form and substance from the model of a "zine" or other "alternative media" as it's generally conceived.

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