Intellectual Property Law

Smart Aggregation is the Solution to Blogorrhea

By Cynthia Brumfield

One navel-gazing debate in the blogosphere and a surprise announcement of venture funding for blogger Scott Karp's Publish2 may not seem related, but they both point to a key opportunity for online publishing entrepreneurs.

The inside-blogging debate started when Dave Winer posted this rant about the "me too" pile-on that typically occurs when a single story captures the blogosphere's imagination and every blogger worth his or her salt chimes in with an opinion. Here's what Dave thinks about this traffic baiting behavior:

What we used to call blogging is now just bullshit about recycled bullshit about recycled bullshit and on and on.

He also accurately says that:

Most people wouldn't recognize an original thought if it bit them in the ass.

When a big story or blog post breaks, every major A-list (and B-list and C-list) blogger feels obligated to chime in and it's wearisome to read all the repetitive posts, most of which add nothing new to the topic. This echo chamber effect is sometimes called blogorrhea and after a while most people probably give up reading all the repetitive posts.

But as Mathew Ingram points out, a lot of good stuff appears in the repetitive junk. You just have to find it.

This is where Publishing2 comes in. The company has raised $2.75 million in funding from Velocity Interactive Group, which counts former Fox Digital Media and AOL top execs Ross Levinsohn and Jonathan Miller as partners.

So far as anyone can tell (the private beta of the service is strictly invitation-only), Publishing2 has been working on a smart aggregation service for journalists, a feed that features all the stories on the web that are "interesting" to journalists and, moreover, voted upon as interesting by journalists.

It's a Digg for news writers and presumably separates the wheat from the chaff. It's hard to say if this is a money-making business or not but it would sure solve the blogorrhea problem -- and, increasingly, the journarrhea problem. Old-style journalists are now bloggers too and even on MSM sites the echo chamber reverberates.

I doubt if the me too style of blogging will ever fade. Writing is hard and original writing is much harder than simply popping off on hot articles or blog posts. But without smart aggregation (something like Techmeme but hand-picked for originality) a lot of good stuff on the Internet won't get read because it's too laborious to sift through the repetitive posts.

P.S. The irony, of course, is that this blog post on smart aggregation as a the way to weed out the blogopshere flotsam and jetsam is, itself, a bit of bloggorhea.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on March 31, 2008 (boomark / email).