I was trying to explain to someone the core difference between my model of Pajamas Media 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.
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.
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.
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.
Then blogging.
Blogging is, in a way, simply the maturation of the ‘personal web’ vision of Geocities and all those Dot-Bomb pioneers.
But, unlike Geocities, it has ignited, in authorship and readership. So now what?
Well, there are two visions.
One is centripetal, gravitational. The other model is centrifugal, dispersive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
_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._
Oh, this idea is really hard to explain sometimes! Almost as difficult to understand as the fact that above water there are no marked paths, therefore you can go in any direction, to anywhere, as long as you don’t crash.
Well stated.
Count me in for the dispersive model, although I think in reality it might be a mix.
I see a gravitational model, only changing with time. This week I’m interested in the Iraq war, so I’ve got half a dozen blogs I’m “browsing”. Next week I might decided to spend some time on aviation, so I change my “center of gravity” to aviation blogs for a while.
Instead of the blogs having a center of gravity, it’s more like the people do. Traffic to blog space will just be a funciton of where everybody’s center of mass is at any moment.
The trick would be to “pre-categorize” all of the subject matter, political leanings, writing styles, etc of every blog, then create a computer model of their general association with other blogs. Lots of neat ways to do this. As the MSM changes national topics, (or as more people shift their center of gravity) a “suggested blog list” would be created based on the user’s opinions and preferences. (I’ll claim that idea as proprietary)
It’s a neat area. As an inventor and computer expert, I can’t wait to see where this all leads.
Good post. A couple of other perspectives worth exploring on this subject are:
1) Do blogs act more as a sustaining innovation for the major media or more as a disruptive innovation?
2) Will network effects tend to overwhelm centripetal effects (the dispersive model) over the longer term?
In other words, are blogs and other new media tools such as pod-casting going to first blow up the existing media industry and then re-consolidate it with new media centers of gravity? Alternatively, will the new technologies ultimately reinforce the appeal AND revenue stream of the existing major media companies? Or, as in AL’s vision, will the new technologies both starve the existing major media companies and replace them with webs of small companies/individuals that do not coalesce into a few major centers of gravity like the existing major media companies? (AL, please correct me if I’m mis-stating your vision).
Daniel Markham is almost certainly correct — it will be a mix — but the cumulative effects over 20-30 years will tilt the balance strongly in one direction or the other.
Interesting times.
There will always be network effects. And let’s not forget Den Beste’s power-law distribution.
The bigest change over “dead tree” media will be how quickly relationships can change and networks reorganize. Capital is still a nice thing to have, but it isn’t as necessary anymore to get your voice heard. This will lead to a very dynamic and changing environment.
So, in order to push this square peg back into it’s round hole, I’d say that the Internet will show dominant centripetal tendencies, characterized by periodic centrifugal eruptions and reorganizations.
You know, like the American economy, only a lot faster. What’s the term? Oh yeah, creative destruction.
lurker,
At the risk of pedantry, it wasn’t Den Beste, it was Shirky.
Matt, This rises above the level of pedantry; and you are indeed right. Thanks for correcting the record.
BTW, anyone not using the Internet form spell-checker in the Google Toolbar is really missing out! Of course, it likely helps me more than the average.
Would you say various forms of tagging – like del.icio.us, technorati tags, etc – are helping the dispersive model? There seems to be a lot of innovation in that area, and all the Kool Kidz are doing it.
Spot on, lurker. Joe Schumpeter would be proud of you.
Do you have any estimates on how long this wave of creative destruction in the media industry will last?
And my second queston in post #4 should have been:
Will network effects tend to overwhelm *centrifugal* effects (the dispersive model) over the longer term?
Looks like lurker understood my thought inspite of the error. Thanks!
There’s actually an interesting negative scale effect in blogging…when a site gets to a certain level of readership, comments tend to become uninteresting…400 comments on an individual post is just too many to read or to have a meaningful discussion.
Well, I finally got around to finish reading the article (but not yet the comments).
Fookin’ briliant.
We Bene Gesserit always advocate the organic model as the strongest and most robust. The social network will both aggregate and disperse, and, as in any self-organizing system, structures will evolve driven by hits and linkage. And devolve when their usefulness is ended.