Moments after posting my last entry (well, in the shower actually) I got to thinking about why blogs have been so effective as a filter for noise on the web. While it is true that blogs in themselves generate and propogate quite a bit of noise, it does seem that the net overall effect is a filtering. It is know that most bloggers read and often link to other blogs in their own entries, this has lead to the description of all blogs as the "blogosphere". However a blogger can only read and filter so much information in a day, so even the authors of the most popular blogs lying close to the center of the blogosphere, only generate entries and links to a relatively small number of items per day.
While blogs now number in the millions, the most popular blogs probably number in the thousands, or perhaps only a few hundred. Naturally it all depends how exactly you define "most popular" but I'm talking about the ones in the top one percentile (or less) of the blogs vs. unique visitors per day curve (I'll call these the "alpha-blogs"). That is to say hits are squewed towards a small number of blogs rather than being evenly ditributed. Thus large numbers (millions) have only a few hits per day, but very few have thousands of more hits per day. To be honest I've actually no idea what the distribution curve of blogs vs. number of daily visitors looks like. So far I've only seen statistics on connectivity of blogs (number of inbound links per blog) which is easy to figure out as part of a standard search engine or blog crawler. Since the blog visitors per day statisitcs are not normally published by each one tt would be interesting to find out. Presumably some of the large hosting sites like blogger.com and livejournal has such information for the blogs they host. So if you have a pointer to such statistics and analysis please send it this way.
One could argue that the most popular "alpha-blogs" are just like the relatively few number of TV channels available to the average media consumer. One could also argue that the blogosphere is not unlike the interconnected official news sources that feed off each others output and filter news from small local communities sources up to the big five media conglomerates. These arguments bothered me, since it still seems apparent that the blog phenonmenom is fundamentally different from the mainstream news reporting system.
In the end I decided the fundamental differences are:
1. It is the very nature of blogs and websites that they interconnect and hence people reading them are constantly poking at the edges of their information network, investigating new sources and ultimately migrating their reading time from one place to the next. Imagine if every day when you watched the news from your local CBS affiliate it gave you an easy link to a dozen other news sources and highly recommended them to boot! Well there's no way that is going to happen, TV channels, radios and newspapers never want to lose their views, listeners or readers - they need you to stay with them to boost their popularity so they can make more money from selling you advertising! Indeed it appears that advertising is the antithesis of blogs, and cross-reference (links) is the antithesis of the mainstream media.
2. As a consequence of 1 the central core of the blogosphere is very fluid because blog popularity is based entirely on free and ever changing selection of sites to visit by the readership. This is contrary to the mainstream world - if find you don't like your NBC, CBS or ABC reporting you probably don't have too many alternatives to turn to. Even if you have cable, by the time you've exhausted Fox (okay, stop laughing), CNN, PBS and a few others you're essentially all out of luck. Plus to a large degree these big guys get the bulk of their content based on Reuters, AP and a few foreign feeds for world news. Ditto for newspapers and radio. Yes, you can do a lot better if you go online and find web based versions of all reportage across the world but you'll find that this is not something a great number of people do. Few people check news from more than one source per day or know of more than a handful of web sites that they might get news from.
3. The mainstream news system has connections down to the city level with most cities having at least one local paper, and perhaps if they are large enough a local radio and TV station, although often as not the latter are more regional. So while you may have some media channels addressing smaller communities it seems that it is increasingly common for members of such communities to resort to an internet forum, website, mailing lists or in most recent time blog based communication. This lack of small community representation by the media appears to be an economic problem. It is simply very expensive and time consuming to put together a newspapaer, TV show or run a radio station without making it a full time job and having hard money to throw at the problem. However, as mentioned earlier, almost anyone can create a blog - even if you are without a computer or Internet connection usually a free library card will get you to somewhere that has. Thus the blogosphere is able to deeply penetrate all communities and hence is relatively much larger than the mainstream "mediasphere" and can draw on a much richer pool of information sources and blog creators. Another consequence of the ease of creating blogs is that the ratio of blog readers to blog creators is much lower than mainstream media consumers to creators.
4. Mainly as a corollary of the previous points, blogs are seldom financially inspired. It is true that some people manage to make a living at it but these are a very tiny, tiny fraction of the total. A larger number might put in some small amount of advertising to defray some of their costs. But the vast majority either has no advertising, or just advertising that is put in automatically by their blog or website host and with which they have no connection or direct gain (other than free hosting). This gives bloggers across the world immense freedom to say whatever the hell they like, do it effectively anonymously if they desire, and best of all they never have to worry about whether anyone is actually really reading their blog or not.
I believe that the above points have together created a unqiue news reporting and filtering system that self-selects popularly defined "interesting" news while still leaving the entire gamut of less interesting stuff out there freely available for those that simply care to Google for it. In many ways the blogosphere acts like the search engine Google itself. The very interconnections between Blogs define how important various blogs are at defining what interesting is, and these interconnections evolve over time, as do what is interesting itself. Thus the blogging phenomenom has engaged us all as a giant distributed, dyanamic and human search engine.
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