Blog Networks: Plazas and Directors Are Better
Feedburner is the newest entrant to the world of blog networks, as reported by Fred Wilson (A VC) and Brad Feld (Feld Thoughts), two investors in Feedburner. The two VCs are also participating in a VC network channeled into a single RSS feed by Feedburner.
After my experiences in Corante, the Web 2.0 Workgroup, and most recently the Federated Media tech page, I have some thoughts about blog networks, both pro and con.
There is a clear traffic increase from participating in any network. When I first moved my blog onto Corante I saw an immediate doubling of my traffic over what I had been seeing as a rogue blogger at BlogSpot. And today, even when the Web 2.0 Workgroup isn't as much of a cohesive entity as it once seemed to be, there is still a measureable traffic moving in from the website. The same is true with the FM tech page. I am not sure if there is any reason for a blogger not to join any network that will accept participation: there may not be a law of diminishing returns here, at all.
The original thought behind Corante Hubs was to create what I have always referred to as "plazas" -- themed watering holes where the best writing about some subject would be pulled together, with some minimal degree of commentary by the plaza's "director". What I had hoped to accomplish with Corante's attempt at blog networks was to ultimately create a semi-self-organized system -- where the feedback of the participants was an important to the result as the editorial-style control of the director. What Corante's current plans are for Hubs are, I confess, I do not know, but when I left late last year that was not really what was being implemented.
The notion of plazas matches up with the aspirations of advertisers on the web. Say that I decide to create a plaza based on the best 100 writers on the subject of design. There is a good chance that such a plaza would relatively quickly eclipse the aggregated individuals in traffic, and would command a premium for advertising. Obviously, it is in the best interests of those managing the plaza to get the contributors to agree to some degree of exclusivity, but clearly it is not necessarily in the interests of the bloggers to do so. Some sort of inducements are going to be necessary -- like a share of advertising revenue -- to make bloggers work with only one network and not another.
Now, Feedburner's traditional focus is on RSS feeds, so the initial roll-out of their networks will be a combined feed of leading bloggers in various areas. Like the 65 VCs that Fred and Brad are hoping to work into their VC network. But I think the fullest expression of networks will be in the form of plazas: real locations on the web, like Corante Hubs and FM pages. I expect that Feedburner will follow this direction in due course.
The notion that such networks can be self-organizing -- as Fred alludes to in his post -- is alluring, but I don't totally believe it. Some individual -- or group of individuals -- will need to decide who to invite, at least at the outset. In this case, Fred and Brad decided. And once the group is formed, in principle, some egalitarian approach to adding and dropping members could be instituted, like membership in a club. You know, need to have two recommendations from current members, etc. But my experience has been largely to the contrary, and the actual experiences in various networks have been rocky.
Mike Arrington hints at some of the tensions in such networks in his recent post on the Feedburner networks:
[from Feedburner Testing Blog Networks]The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control - in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible. I know this from personal experience.
Mike is alluding to the Web 2.0 Workgroup, I guess. I won't air the linen in public, but let's just say that some of the backchannel discussions have been difficult at times. And the experience I have had with group blogs and other networks are equally problematic. Just turning people away who stated that they would be happy to blog at Corante was an annoyance, because we strove to only host the best and the brightest.
Perhaps some impartial arbiter -- something like a Technorati or a TechMeme -- could serve to determine who should be in and who out of a network. Perhaps. But for me, I think there is a new role soon to emerge: not an editor, exactly, since the individual would not be editing people's writings, or sourcing stories. But instead more of an active reader of the best writers on a topic, who would pull out the most important posts everyday, and highlight why they deserve our attention. These network directors, as I call them, would add critical value to the plaza, and make the user experience much more than just a combined stream. The participation of other active readers could also help, with ratings or votes for various posts leading to a network-specific authority rating for its writers, for example.
In the final analysis, creating a social matrix in which these writings can be put into context is a tremendous opportunity for new media companies. Like nearly everything else going on in the Web, media will be socialized, and greatly improved by that socialization. With the torrent of writing available, relying on a few well-informed network directors to help turn a jumble of gazillions of posts into the most important 25 things to read today is a potentially enormous advance over the manual way that we approach the blogosphere today. And just converging a bunch of blogs' feeds into one giant firehose doesn't help me make sense of the chaos, but a really good network director will.
I'm intrigued by the potential for new media by combining information from disparate sources; I think there is some work to be done in automated creation of topic-based networks, similar to Techmeme (which is about the best out there at this point).
One question; you describe the "network directors" as:
"...more of an active reader of the best writers on a topic, who would pull out the most important posts everyday, and highlight why they deserve our attention."
How is this different than a plain old blog?
Posted by: Greg Gershman | August 08, 2006 at 09:31 PM
Greg - I think of a plaza as being supported by a bunch of feeds, and reblog-type functionality. A stream of potentially relevant posts from a variety of sources, with the director selecting the most interesting and adding a few comments. More like some people's sideblogs maybe, although the plaza would include all the posts of the contributors.
Posted by: Stowe Boyd | August 09, 2006 at 03:31 AM