What are we missing?

Social media people still haven’t shaken broadcast thinking. So many still think there’s a relationship between attention and credibility. If I write a bestseller, I’ll be smarter than I was before I wrote the book, and a guy who writes a very smart book that doesn’t quite take off can’t be as smart as I am. Cream rises to the top. In the social media world, if I’m an A-list blogger, I’m smarter and cooler – even more so, because there’s so much more competition for attention in the blogosphere.

I think there are a lot of factors in producing success in the economy of attention, and being the smartest guy in the room ain’t necessarily one of them. Working hard and even working smart won’t necessarily do it for you. Talent isn’t enough. Having a smart PR person or machine will help. Luck is a big part of the deal – right place right time etc.

Someday I’ll talk about ways to get attention for yourself, but that’s not what I was thinking about when I started writing this post. The point I really want to make is that there are a lot of really smart, talented, and capable people in the world that nobody knows. They have zero visibility, and they don’t even try to get attention. In fact, real wisdom would probably suggest you don’t want the attention unless that happens to be your thing. Getting real attention – fame – is a lot of work and could get in the way of anything else you might want to do.

What I’m thinking about today is how we leverage intelligence and talent that we don’t necessarily see, and how we establish credibility for smart thinking that isn’t acknowledged by the media (or social media) machine. We like to think that social media is about crowdsourcing and brings more people into the conversation, but I’m not sure this is true. Consider the concept of the a-list blogger and Clay Shirky’s application of power law thinking to the blogosphere:

Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day, most of the new readers are adding to the traffic of the top few blogs, while most new blogs are getting below average traffic, a gap that will grow as the weblog world does. It’s not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it’s harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year. At some point (probably one we’ve already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term ‘blog’ will fall into the middle distance, as ‘home page’ and ‘portal’ have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning. This will happen when head and tail of the power law distribution become so different that we can’t think of J. Random Blogger and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit as doing the same thing.

At the head will be webloggers who join the mainstream media (a phrase which seems to mean “media we’ve gotten used to.”) The transformation here is simple – as a blogger’s audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can’t link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can’t answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.

Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will become conversational. In a world where most bloggers get below average traffic, audience size can’t be the only metric for success. LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts. LiveJournal has an edge on most other blogging platforms because it can keep far better track of friend and group relationships, but the rise of general blog tools like Trackback may enable this conversational mode for most blogs.

Clay wrote this in 2003; what we’ve seen since then is pretty consistent with his predictions.

The short version of what I’m thinking about is this: how do we find and leverage real intelligence within the long tail of bloggers, and how do we extract and process useful knowledge from larger ongoing conversations on the web. One way might be to depend quite a bit on writers who filter – who are exploring and crunching the larger conversations, placing them in context, and interpreting their meaning and relevance. We depend on thought leaders and intelligent aggregators.

And we still probably miss the thinking of some of the smartest people who for whatever reason don’t release their thoughts into the wild.

Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

6 thoughts on “What are we missing?”

  1. “..how do we find and leverage real intelligence within the long tail of bloggers, and how do we extract and process useful knowledge from larger ongoing conversations on the web.” …

    you don’t have to, if you understand that you cannot possibly miss anything that you need to have in this world .. it is all set up so that your mind, intuition if you need that concept, constantly creates the circumstances needed for your highest accomplishment ..

    you can not avoid it even if you try ..

    so, we can relax, don’t worry about being the doer, just be receptive .. and bang, there is the right link, the right conversation, the right thought ..

    some people have invented the concept of the higher self to explain how this happens, but it is really just an aspect of us ..

    enjoy, gregory lent

  2. I do a show that consciously seeks out difference and what and who we don’t know yet (heathergold.com/show) in is very very easy to find people, especially as twitter grows. But to find them you have to look. And to look have have to want to look. And to want to look, you have to know there’s something your missing and care. It’s a kind of tummeling.

    web 3.0 needs tummeling http://tr.im/1z24. We need it within and across spaces and via web apps as yet unwritten. It’s something that traditionally women have done unnoticed.

  3. That’s brilliant, Heather.

    Interesting, I scrolled down to read the comment that quotes you:

    “This is what hold people together : it’s each other. Part of the reason we solve problems isn’t just to build the bridge to go across the river, it’s because the feeling of doing it together is awesome”

    Then I scrolled down to it again just as you were saying it on the vid.

    Whatever god or energy or spaghetti monster was at the controls at that moment really wanted me to get that point.

    I’m gonna share this vid with the Plutopia crew…

  4. Jon:

    Another great post! It strikes me that some new bloggers go to the A List bloggers to get a feel for what to do and see how others write as they find their voice. This is a bit of the guru/follower syndrome. Bummer.

    The emphasis on conversation and what Heather is quoted above as saying is the key here is not just conversation, it is connection and the sense of community that brings people together and enriches them from that experience.

    Don’t have an answer here yet you’ve reminded me of something important – if you build, and they come, you’d better be prepared to stay in the conversation.

    Perhaps what will happen is that we’ll develop a different strategy over time when it comes to blogs – what we need and how we access blogs will shift from “follow A list and learn how” to seek out those people who are doing X.

    As I’ve bumped up my Twitter followers, I learned something new – I didn’t have to follow EVERY tweet and now view it more like a fire hose of info flow. I drink when it is relevant rather than having to capture and know each tweet that comes across. What is your experience here? What changes do you see in the future about how people access information when so much is available at any given moment? THAT might be interesting to track and write about!!

  5. I’ve always read Twitter the way you describe it – as a firehose and not tweet by tweet. I’ve also always felt that many people surf blogs rather than read them post by post. It’s an interesting way to take information – persistent inquiry across many voices, which voices you take on which subjects depending to some extent on random selection and serendipity, resulting in an assortment of facts and perceptions that is quite unlike what you would have if you built your world on a flow of information from limited channels – the New York Times and NPR, or the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, or Walt Disney’s Comics and The Adventures of Spiderman. We’re getting a really interesting diversity of thought, and now’s a good time to think about how we integrate that diversity in communities. Those communities are also quite unlike communities a century ago – they emerge ad hoc from within the web mediasphere, and they’re also quite diverse. Make a noise, people gather ’round, and you start crowdsourcing a new reality.

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