Steve Rubel on The Lazysphere

I personally think Steve had too much rich food over the holidays, and it’s made him dyspeptic. While I agree that Techmeme naturally leads to a pile-on mindset among a small group of bloggers, the notion that the entire blogosphere’s value is declining is just silly:

[from Micro Persuasion: The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging]

[…]

The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won’t name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another “me too” blog post. Their goal is largely to land on Techmeme and sometimes digg - perhaps Google in an archival/Long Tail perspective. These sites - and Twitter too - have perpetuated a lot of lackadaisical writing. The Attention Crash is another factor at work here. People don’t have as much time to think.

People have just as much time to think this week as last year. Personally, if we want to rant and rail against something that really stinks, let’s tell people to turn their televisions off.

Steve, on the other hand, suggests that he, and a short list of those bloggers he thinks are worth reading, can turn the tide. The rest of us are just a bunch of lazy bastards, too busy twittering and echo-chambering to do anything meaningful.

Somehow — maybe it’s the political season — this feels like a democrat ‘attacking from the right’: using the rhetoric of republicans to discredit those that are too liberal.

I believe that the nature of blogging *is* shifting, microtectonically, as people are exploring the use of new tools like Techmeme, Twitter, Seesmic, and so on. But it’s not laziness: it’s innovation and exploration.