{"id":926,"date":"2005-12-02T07:47:06","date_gmt":"2005-12-02T07:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:28","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:28","slug":"the_centripetal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=926","title":{"rendered":"The Centripetal vs. the Centrifugal Web"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was trying to explain to someone the core difference between my model of Pajamas Media<\/a> and the one being implemented, when I reached for a metaphor and found that it worked, so I want to write it out before I lose it.<\/p>\n

Up until the rise of the blogs, the media was centralized in large masses; these masses grew, shrunk, evolved and changed, but the basic rule was that there was a sharp boundary between the ‘generator’ of information and the consumer of it. We might get a half page of letters to the editor, but otherwise, we’d read what had been printed for us.<\/p>\n

Alternatives constantly grew – the alternative press, local content cable – but quickly topped out in audience or were abandoned by the forces of the market or the fatigue of those whose labor of love they so obviously were.<\/p>\n

Then, the web, and blogs.At first, the web tried to be like Big Media (Slate, Salon, MSN, Yahoo), and to a large extent, it has succeeded. Centers of mass have been created on the Web that rival traditional media outlets in reach, and those traditional media outlets – network television and newspapers – have been fragmented in one case, and starved in the other.<\/p>\n

Then blogging.<\/p>\n

Blogging is, in a way, simply the maturation of the ‘personal web’ vision of Geocities and all those Dot-Bomb pioneers.<\/p>\n

But, unlike Geocities, it has ignited, in authorship and readership. So now what?<\/p>\n

Well, there are two visions.<\/p>\n

One is centripetal, gravitational. The other model is centrifugal, dispersive.<\/p>\n

The gravitational model implies that the big will get bigger, congregate, consolidate. The ‘community’ of bigger sites will increasingly drive conversation between themselves – much as the Washington Post and New York Times did – and, in theory risk starving the smaller blogs of attention and traffic.<\/p>\n

It’s a pretty traditional model, and it seems like a logical, somewhat safe bet is to assume that this is the direction that blogging should head. It becomes more like Big Media, as Big Media gets bloggier.<\/p>\n

The dispersive model implies that the big will themselves begin to be starved for traffic as traffic is continually dispersed between large sets of smaller sites. Technology (my notion of a ‘follow me’ button on browsers, as well as some other things I cooked up) begins to make it possible for me to have sites suggested to me behaviorally, rather than as the result of my searching for specific concepts or ideas. I can find them by searching for like-minded people, and by looking to see what they are looking for and at.<\/p>\n

This is much more of an emergent model; it imposes no order, deliberately selects no up-and-comers, it simply builds an infrastructure and turns people loose within it to act as people always do.<\/p>\n

There was a story I recall hearing in grad school about a landscape architect who never laid down paths when first designing the landscape for campuses of buildings. He’d simply plant the whole thing with grass, and wait a year or so to see where people made the paths.<\/p>\n

That always seemed like a good idea to me. So does the centrifugal model, and building tools to both facilitate and profit by that model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will blogs consolidate or disperse?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}