— Now that Mickey Kaus’ Kausfiles blog has moved to Slate, his traffic will go up and he’ll be linked by more sites, increasing his relevance in the Blogosphere from 247,000th (kausfiles.com’s Alexa ranking) to 2,845th (Slate’s Alexa ranking). This puts him ahead of the leading blogs, NRO (11,066), Arts & Letters Daily (18,337), Sullivan … Continue reading “Is Instapundit over?”
— Now that Mickey Kaus’ Kausfiles blog has moved to Slate, his traffic will go up and he’ll be linked by more sites, increasing his relevance in the Blogosphere from 247,000th (kausfiles.com’s Alexa ranking) to 2,845th (Slate’s Alexa ranking). This puts him ahead of the leading blogs, NRO (11,066), Arts & Letters Daily (18,337), Sullivan (49,465), Dave Winer (57,381), and Instapundit (68,172).
As the sixth-leading blog, Instapundit isn’t exactly the king maker he was when he was the second-leading linker last November, and people are starting to notice that an Instapundit link isn’t the avalanche of hits it used to be (in some cases it’s not even noticeable.) The blogosphere is now so large that nobody can manually index it every day, so visitors to Reynolds’ site read the summaries and rarely click-through, realizing that he’s just got the tip of the top of one of the flotilla of icebergs. More and more, we’re relying on automation to sift and filter and find the cool stories in the Blogosphere, which means more Daypop and Blogdex, and less Professor Reynolds, Dave Winer, and similar manual link-makers.
Steven Johnson speculates on the next evolution of the Blogosphere in a Salon article referencing old-school blogger Jason Kottke and others of the manual search bent, contrasting blogs with journalism:
But the debate is a false one. What makes blogs interesting is precisely the way in which they’re not journalism. Sure, if more writers can follow in Sullivan’s wake and turn their blogs into revenue-generating enterprises, blogs will certainly mark a qualitative change as far as the underlying economics go. (Effectively it will mean that bloggers have a new, usually modest revenue stream to supplement what they take home from their day jobs.) But the journalistic form itself won’t be all that earth-shattering, certainly no more revolutionary than the first-generation Web zines, which were often staffed like old-style print magazines, but sported hypertext, multimedia and genuine community interaction alongside those traditional mastheads.
More in this vein in Wired and at Nick Denton, who’s building a next-generation blog company. Johnson and Kottke are too hung-up on the details of how the existing web might transition to the Semantic Web, probably because they don’t have the background in textual analysis, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence to catch on to methods that are outside the scope of HTML, XML, SOAP, or any of today’s web-building techniques.
Here’s what’s going to happen: in a few months, you’ll be able to build a blog, or more precisely, a dynamic web site, with content largely selected for you by a search robot that understands what you like, who you like, and where the stuff you like is found. You’ll edit a selection of stories found and presented to you by your search robot, and you’ll comment if you please on the stuff you decide to include in your own Daily Dish.
The collective choices of you and others like you will be refined story-by-story, topic-by-topic, and day-by-day until a Best of the Web that reflects your own tastes and values, and those of people you trust, will be your guide to the Blogosphere. And when that happens, Reynolds, Steven Johnson, and the other beacons of the Blogosphere can get to doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, namely analyzing, opining, theorizing, and creating content (or thinking, as we used to say when I was a philosophy student,) instead of vainly trying to direct traffic. And it will be a better web, and a better blogosphere, and a better Noosphere than we have now:
“No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
(The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947)
The techniques and methods of this emerging web were all described in a theoretical way by Vannevar Bush, the first blogger, in his seminal 1945 article, As We May Think:
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
That’s where we’re going; how we get there won’t matter to most people.
Update: See Jeff Jarvis, Reed Stott, Henry Copeland and Eric Olsen for reflections on this theme, courtesy of Matt Welch. Glenn unfortunately believes this post was about him, and not about the web, human knowledge and civilization, and technology. Sorry folks, but the Instapundit stuff was just the hook, not the story.
