Mathemagenic

A follow-up thinking for my previous post: I wonder if aggregation kills personal voices.

Think of a simple scenario. You start blogging, you find several blogs you like, you discover news aggregator and start reading these blogs regularly. It creates a sense of connection with the authors of these weblogs, sense of knowing them. It creates a context for interpreting posts.

Then upscaling comes: you have hundreds of weblogs and no time to read everything. You scan for interesting titles and jump back and forth. It’s convenient, but your pay less attention to any specific weblog and you don’t get to know its writer well.

I wonder if it’s true. What if once I have more than X weblogs in my news aggregator they become content, news bits and not personal voices any more?

This brings me to another question. We say that weblogs provide a context to interpret ideas (btw, this is one of “weblog selling points” for knowledge management). What exactly provides this context: informal writing style, ability to see other posts, regular reading or something else?

For me much of the context is provided by regular reading. It creates a sense of knowing a blogger and makes connecting with his or her ideas easier. But the problem is that regular reading doesn’t scale: news readers make it easier than browsing, but after a certain number of weblogs they don’t help (and I guess magic number 150 has something to do with it). If upscaling weblog audience turns it into broadcasting (discussion overview), may be upscaling number of weblogs you read turns them from voices into content?

This is also one more point for weblogs in business: tools vs. voices dilemma. More practically speaking, if a company-wide weblog aggregation (think of k-collector :) will turn weblogs into a smart content management system?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/02.html#a821; comments are here.

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