The 7 Ages of Blog Content - so far....

Deirdre Molloy left a thoughtful comment on an earlier post of mine, which she then expanded on on her blog Innovation Cloud, noting the Seven Ages of Blogmedia:

Here’s my verbose response (but it’s a mammoth issue - my lame excuse)

(1) Initially, in terms of connecting blogosphere conversation together there was trackback, but then along came the traditional publishers and they couldn’t deal with the (spam / gaming) issues, nor incorporate the lessons of online communities’ design or etiquette so far. Thus the promise held out by trackback (see Nico Macdonald, ‘Comment is Free,’ but designing communities is hard, Online Journalism Review, 17th July 2006) was quashed.

(2) Then trackback spam arrived (your favourite Alan) - possibly the final nail in the coffin of trackback’s potential (if we agree pingbacks are the watered-down substitute).

(3) In turn, beyond mere feed readers, more sophisticated aggregators like Netvibes and other “thin portal[s] of widgets” (to quote Mike Butcher on a post about Sleevenotez he wrote on Vecosys, since deleted by the blog owner) entered the arena, along with cross-platform microblogging. The social web and mobile stuff more generally - rather than just the blogosphere - at least became more manageable [see also Jaiku, though it's gone quiet since Google acquired it late in 2007, and interesting lifestream propositions like Rememble].

(4) But before we could take a breath, social networks went zoom, and we were pouring tons of valuable-to-trivial content, discussion and links (it’s all a continuum, right) into the likes of Facebook and Bebo. But it was hellish-difficult/impossible to connect this back out to the open internet, the ahead of its time [and much lamented] BlogFriends for pouring back in-and-out notwithstanding.

(5) Now we have the next wave of aggregators: Friendfeed, favorit, Plaxo’s Pulse feature, the recently souped-up MyBlogLog et al.

(6) And hot on their tails - for the blogerati - Cocomment, Disqus, SezWho, and IntenseDebate became part of the equation, some of whom even have social network integration in their pipeline apparently [my, that sounds rather painful]

(7) This doesn’t even factor in the photo and video outfits out there - Seesmic, Qik, Flickr video, Google Video, Vimeo, BlipTV [gratuitous interview and Beers & Innovation RSS Frontiers video linkage], Moblog and the like; especially the cross-platform players among them. Who has even mentioned or interrogated their part in the connected web in this month’s discussion? Yep, time to remove the old-skool web goggles.

So now that the conversation has left the blogosphere [ReadWriteWeb, 20th March 2008] where does that leave us?

If the walled garden is crumbling, but our attention is ever more stretched, and our conversational quality and digital health suffering, is the model of aggregating eyeballs doomed or due for a fresh lease of life from the most innovative but implacably dominating mover in this space?

I was thinking of how best to answer this when I saw another article today on Read Write Web essentially claiming content is not king, but a common commodity.

What this means for us as bloggers and new media creators is that the very technologies that we have grown to love are the same forces that are turning our efforts, be them our words, our videos, our music, our photos, or anything we create, into a commodity - something that has little monetary value on its own, but in aggregate, can become something of value....

.....However, we can't on the one hand support the commoditization of other media - happy to download music either via P2P or for pocket change and cry when DRM restricts its copying - and then, at the same time, purport that our very own creations, like our blog posts, or even more absurdly, the comments around those posts, have some sort of value that is above and beyond them becoming commodities as well.

Well, many do have this irrational view - welcome to the irrational world of the FreeTards

Leaving this aside, Deirdre's point is (implicitly) answered by the Read Write Web story - individual blog content is worth the square root of F* all, but en masse it has value - mainly by grabbing attention time from us, as that is a fixed good in the medium term (my future NPV divided by hours per day), hence that is what every New Wave play is trying to wrest away from the last lot.

So will the New New Aggregators - Friendfeed etc etc - be the endgame? As I noted in my earlier post, I fail to to see how our blog posts and your comments, fragmented over multiple services, is a more compelling service than todays' "Good Enoughs" unless one of them achieves high market dominance.

As Phil Bradley notes, what we really want is where he can write all his comments on his blog aggregator, and it is represented on my blog so I can see all comments he makes, and we can both see the conversation. But quite why you or I will sign up for N current aggregators to give each one some Partial Differentiated Attention is unclear. Not only that, but it is clear from the weekends' discussion that no way can they do this and fund themselves without falling foul of millions of small-cap copyright problems.

Thus, I think there is (at least) an 8th Age of the Blogcosm - an open service - or all this lot opening up to each other - that does all this, and aggregates (or bypasses) all these aggregators.