Saturday's session of BloggerCon at Harvard Law was covered live by abundant bloggers. Doc Searles noted that the segment on blogs in journalism focused on the theme of "The Web as a writers medium," which he extrapolated into "The Web as a reader's medium." See Go ahead. Look it up. I agree, but note that this insight directly contradicts many "commercial" web designers' advice: keep written content short, because "people don't read more than a few words of text on the Web." Maybe that's true for people who still think of the Web as "TV on their PC," and may be practical advice for people trying to sell fungible consumer goods.
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Serious bloggers know that a valuable segment of Web users do read longer pieces, particularly if they enable them to dig deeper. Doc points to the ability to link, which makes the Web actionable by readers, as one key to the Web's superiority to paper media for those who want to explore a topic fully.
During the afternoon's session on Blogs in Presidential Politics, the huge public response to the Dean for President blog ("Blog for America") was a topic of much discussion and begrudging "respect" from its competitors represented there. Besides the stunning amount of campaign donations received in small average amounts, Dean's blog manager reported that over 2200 comments per hour come in to that blog - that's user-posted comments, not page views.
One panelist commented that the use of a campaign blog with unfiltered user comments was beneficial primarily for the "buzz" and sense of community that resulted. Moderator Dave Winer expressed some concern about that: he seemed troubled that a medium with such potential for education and thoughtful debate about policy issues might be used just to generate "buzz."
Dan Bricklin was shooting digital photos of the conference participants and loading them up through the day, and Kevin Marks was feeding live cam from the front row as well. All in all, an exciting day, with a high adrenile and idealism quotient. I had to turn around and drive back to Hartford, and was sorry to miss the 'tails party and dinners with speakers.
A BloggerCon "Local Feed" has been aggregating those who are blogging the conference, which continues today (Sunday, 10/5). Visit that site to get an idea of the many excellent commentators that are writing about the conference and its pre- and after-parties and meals. It also illustrates a question: Assuming no human can read and absorb all of those comments, how does one find the few commentators on which one decides to rely to follow such an event? Not just this event, but any one that has a high interest quotient?
Though this use of the medium may lack infrastructure barriers to entry, the very volume of "free" supply of writing (good and less good) does itself raise a barrier ... not to entry by the writers, but to selection and absorbtion by the readers. Does the overload of free goods in the commons raise a challenge for consumers? How does one find and distinquish "free crap" (as my 17-year old refers to the remaining unsold stuff dragged to the curb the morning after a tag sale) from the "public service information" goods that are of true value? Will a writer's need to develop reputation and inclusion in a circle of trusted sources impose a new barrier to entry?
Posted by dougsimpson at October 5, 2003 07:47 AM | TrackBack