January 05, 2006
My, how blogs change
I used to enjoy reading Brad DeLong's blog daily and, after having not looked at it for perhaps two or three years now, I went back (following a link from Marginal Revolution).
The result? I used to enjoy his short, to-the-point, smart analysis of everything--and a couple of ones each day! Denbeste would call him a "thinker." But his blog now: just about all of the ~16 entries are links to and excerpts from other articles and blogs. Denbeste would now call him a "linker." No wonder I stopped reading: his analyses are always more interesting to me than his choice of links.
The slow change in Delong's blog reminds us that it is hard to keep up producing quality content over time. Denbeste's retirement himself demonstrated this point more than anything else. The contrast between the two is interesting: when Denbeste couldn't keep it up anymore, he retired and started a fun blog only about Anime; but when Delong couldn't, he--over time--just slowly and mostly imperceptibly lowered the quality of the blog by writing less and linking more.
Implicit in the above is that linking blogs are of a lower quality than thinking blogs. That may or may not be true (is Glenn Reynolds blog of a lower quality than Denbeste's? I don't know, the answer isn't obvious to me). But what is true is that, if you have the high standards of being one type, and then change into a mediocre version of the other type, then it's the result is more disappointment than anything else.
Another lesson from this: in the blogosphere a few years ago, there was a good ratio of thinkers-to-linkers. But what has happened is that the number of linkers has grown much much more than the number of thinkers (a number which shrunk disproportionately on Denbeste's retirement!). Now, there are endless linkers pointing to the same, small set of content.
Yet another lesson: being a good thinker doesn't imply you're a good linker, and vice-versa--they're different skill sets.
A final lesson: if you see something every day, it's hard to notice change; but if you don't see something for a long time and then return, it becomes obvious what has changed.
Posted by Morgan at 09:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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