From Jeremy Zawodny
In his reaction to Dave Sifry's latest blogosphere (god, I hate that word) stats, Greg Linden says:
The important question is not how many weblogs there are, but how many useful and interesting weblogs there are. Many weblogs are spam, fake, or inactive. Readers don't care about these. Readers want useful news content. So, how many useful weblogs are there?
And then...
In fact, the number is probably even lower. Since the 1M number Jim reports is the number of weblogs in Bloglines that have at least one subscription, the number of weblogs that are interesting enough to attract several subscribers is likely much lower, perhaps as low as 100k.
Now this is the part of the post where I'm supposed to invoke The Long Tail and explain that this is all Just Fine.
But the reality is that I don't care. I don't care how many blogs there are and neither do most people. What matters is finding stuff you like and being able to subscribe to, right?
Who is working on solving that problem?
This is the part of the post where I'm supposed to explain that My Yahoo! solves all your content discovery needs, right? Well it doesn't. Near as I can tell, nobody's cracked that nut yet.
The burden today is on the readers and the publishers. Publisher add a growing collection of "Add to..." or "Subscribe on..." buttons to their pages, and readers try all sorts of stuff to find Good Content.
This feels like the 90s all over again, doesn't it?
We need interestingness for blogs and blog posts. Maybe Six Apart should do that for the blogs hosted on their site. (Yeah, I know... they're lacking a lot of the community stuff that makes Flickr's interestingness work.)
Human aggregators and community sites help me find cool stuff.
Lists don't help much, on the Feedster 500, Channel9 made # 36 and Ourmedia is #90, most days Feedster can't find me and when I go digging other search sites find many more people linking to me.
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