I’ve been finding the ‘sphere somewhat empty of late. I think that partly it’s because of a sameness of voices, something I blogged here, and that my friend Mark Evans writes about today also. This may be an aggregator effect – a tendency of automated aggregation to select content mechanistically (how about tweaking the Flickr interestingness algorithm for the ‘sphere?), and the habit of bloggers to look first to Techmeme at al for their daily fix.
But I’m also wondering whether it’s because of a laxity creeping into writing on the web – someone I think may be happening (unless you’re Jeff Jarvis or Dave Pollard) because of the proliferation of content, the ease of publication and the common attitude that to get one’s traffic up (a common web 2.0 mantra, it seems) one needs to “blog early and blog often”. I don’t think it’s just blogs – last night Mathew took a poke at a credulous “happy shiny web 2.0 people” CNet piece about the latest Youtube valuation nonsense that also irked me when I first read it.
I don’t think it’s about jumping the shark, but I do think we may have come to a million monkeys point in the ‘sphere’s growth curve. My sense is that these days, many folks are just phoning it in.
Or perhaps it’s just the August effect – that is, because Nick Carr’s on vacation.