Now that's interesting!
It was while trying to find more information about, or articles by, John Hiler,
that I stumbled across Jonathon Delacour. From his
"latest" blog entries, it seems that Delacour hasn't been blogging for
at least a year now, but there was quite a bit worth reading in his blog that
could easily occupy my time instead of getting around to writing this (or to other
tasks).
Delacour referred to another article by Hiler (this one, from
2002, also inaccessible other than via the cache of Google search) titled The
Tipping Blog - How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic. Delacour
quotes Hiler: ... it's a lot easier to blog a quick
link than it is to come up with your own content! When you come across an interesting
link during your surfing, just stick the link in a blog window, snippet out a
quote, and (if you're up for it) add a quick comment. It may only take you a minute...
but if your visitors check out the article, then they could up to half an hour
of reading out of it.
Compare this to a personal blog about your life
- it can take half an hour to write, but your readers only get a minute of reading
out of it. With such brutal time-economics working against personal blogs, the
majority of blog posts are made up of the familiar link + quote + comment.
Hiler
wants to tell us something about the ways that ideas spread via blogs, but Delacour
uses Hiler in order to ask whether writing a personal blog entry is actually worth
the time and effort. Through a very simple table he shows us that, when we factor
in the reading time that readers devote to what they find on blogs, just sticking
links into our blogs, almost without commenting on them, is much more worth our
while, we get a much greater return on our investment, than devoting the time
to writing a lengthy personal blog entry.
Delacour, of course, doesn't
stop there. He then goes on to ask why, if the time-economics are so heavily titled
against those lengthy personal blog entries, we still write them. I doubt that
his answers, and the numerous examples he presents from other bloggers, would
surprise anyone who reads these columns.
Go to: Whatever happened to ..., or
Go to:
Who needs them?, or
Go to: A
magic strand?