I recently bought my brother, Zach, a train set for his fifth birthday. (He’s nineteen years younger than I am.) When I visited my father’s house last night, the electronic trains were already whirring around the tracks.
But minutes after I’d arrived, Zach took the trains off of the tracks, ripped the tracks apart… and began reconstructing them from scratch. I laughed at his childish impulses, and I felt obligated to teach him an important life lesson: “If it ain’t broke… don’t fix it.”
But before I imparted such worldly wisdom, I saw that he was laying the tracks in a very different pattern than before. And rather than stifle his creativity with a clichéd and outdated lesson, I sat down in a nearby chair and watched him build. The efficiency with which he worked was amazing, and when he was done – about twenty minutes later – the track was much “cooler”, more fun, and even more structurally sound than it had been before he destroyed it.
“If something isn’t broke,” I’ll be sure to tell him as he gets older, “it can likely still be ‘fixed’. And it’s the obligation of those of us with creative impulses to do the fixing.”
The Growing Influence of Blogs
At the turn of the millennium, a blog was still just a blog. There were a few hundred thousand of them, and their capacity for creating, aggregating, and distributing information hadn’t yet been discovered.
That’s all changed since! Today, blogs number in the tens of millions (at least), blog readers number in the hundreds of millions, and together blog writers and readers have become a cornerstone of our cultural consciousness. According to most major marketers, blogs – not television – are most often responsible for the “tipping point” that makes or breaks products, businesses, and even political candidates.
As blogs have become increasingly important, so too has the need to better understand how they function – and whether they are functioning as efficiently as possible. To gain this understanding, we need a vocabulary that will help us explain why, in my opinion, blogs (and bloggers) have harnessed only part of their potential power… and how, perhaps, we can enable them to harness the other part!
A Vocabulary for Blogs and Blog Functionality
Today, bloggers seem to fulfill three interdependent and oftentimes overlapping functions in the blogosphere:
- Online Diarists record thoughts and events in their personal lives without seeking to connect them to some greater purpose. Usually their readership is limited to personal contacts or people who relate to their experiences.
- Creators (Producers) make content that people want to read, hear, or see. This content can either be created anew or recreated from existing content. The creators can be either companies, such as Comedy Central or CNN, or people, such as, well, me.
- Distributors find (or allow others to find) relevant material and instantaneously distribute it to users. They can be companies such as Digg or Technorati, or they can be individuals, such as all of the 100 most popular Digg users who distribute tens or even hundreds of new links each day.
A Spectrum of Creation
All bloggers are creators. They put information and connections on pages that were once not there. This is creation! But clearly there is a spectrum of creation in the blogosphere: Blogs on the more “creative” end of the spectrum contribute more “creative” value (however we choose to measure it)… and blogs on the less creative end of the spectrum contribute almost no “creative” value.
A blogger who writes an exposé on corrupt politicians, and links to various pieces of evidence online, is “creating” knowledge that is likely valuable to others… So is the blogger that uploads a video of his world championship winning break-dance sequence that will be sure to make it to YouTube, and eventually give two minutes of enjoyment to millions of people.
But the blogger who links to the top ten most popular music videos online – a set of links that can be found on hundreds of similarly opportunistic blogs, isn’t creating much value… Nor is the blogger who adds dozens of popular links to his blog each day in an attempt to drive traffic – and revenue – to his blog.
By understanding that blogs add varying amounts of “creative” value to the blogosphere, we can start to better understand the relationship between creation and large-scale distribution.
A Spectrum of Distribution
All bloggers are distributors. When a blogger publishes a blog, she has also made it available to each of the billion or so people who use the Internet – this is distribution! But like creation, distribution in the blogosphere exists on a spectrum: Some blogs distribute content only to the most immediate friends, families, or admirers, and other blogs enjoy large-scale distribution aided by sponsors, customers, search engines, and social media.
An academic who speculates about dark matter may tend toward the more creative end of the blogging spectrum, but because of the specificity of his subject matter, as well as his lack of understanding of large-scale online distribution, he doesn’t distribute beyond just a few colleagues.
On the other end of the spectrum, an opportunist who links to the hundred most popular videos on YouTube, may veer toward the less creative end of the spectrum – it’d be hard to argue that he’s adding much creative value – yet he may enjoy large-scale distribution because he publicizes each link on social media sites daily, and has artificially inflated the relative “importance” of his site on search engines that take link value into account.
Where we fall on the spectrum of distribution has much more to do with our understanding of marketing and distribution than whether we are offering anything of creative value!
Bloggers Prefer to Distribute Rather than Create
Anyone who reads blogs has probably noticed a trend. The vast majority of the top 100,000 blogs add very little creative value. Rather, they provide links to a minority of bloggers and websites that do add significant creative value.
Most blogs tend to do this because the rewards for distribution are significantly higher than the rewards for creation. By simply linking to popular content and publicizing those links on search engines and social media sites, one can enjoy large-scale distribution which can translate into revenue (through advertising) and social cachet that comes with being part of the “in” crowd. On the other hand, creating content (which may or may not become popular) takes significant effort that may or may not pay off in terms of page views and advertising dollars… or social cachet!
It’s wonderful that so many people have become distributors! Information had been in the hands of the few for too long and now more people have a chance, and an incentive, to help new and different voices to be heard.
But when people choose to become opportunistic large-scale distributors, they oftentimes are inherently choosing to offer less “creative” value to the blogosphere… and thus are passing over the opportunity to create new ideas and information themselves.
Why We Should Encourage More Creation
Blogs can connect people and ideas in ways that were never before possible. With blogs, people can contribute to a global marketplace of ideas that can influence better collective decisions.
Though there are tens of millions of bloggers, only a small percentage are currently adding appreciable creative “value”… because they’re instead focusing on the social and monetary incentives that come with distribution. What if a much larger percentage of bloggers decided to contribute their creative energies? Well, we could get real work done!!
“If something isn’t broke… it can likely still be ‘fixed’. And it’s the obligation of those of us with creative impulses to do the fixing.”
So how do we foment this blogging culture of creation? How do we make creation cool? And how do we create adequate rewards for creation?
How to Encourage More Creation
What’s required, I believe, is a fundamental shift in the cultural consciousness of bloggers. Rather than thinking about blogs as a place for opportunism… where with enough publicity we can make things with almost no value monetizable, we can think about blogs as a forum that emphasizes creation and discussion.
This isn’t unheard of. It’s done everyday in the open-source community, where people create for the sake of making something that has never before been made… and for social status to be sure. To the degree that this mindset can be transferred to the blogosphere, we can make blogging a more productive – and ultimately more profitable experience (because creating more value is ultimately more profitable – in the aggregate – than pointing to others who create value).
So how do we enact this shift in cultural consciousness? My thoughts for this aren’t yet fully formed, and I’m excited about hearing your ideas as well. Better still, send me a link to your blog and let’s get the creative juices flowing!
