05.23.05

Distribution of Content Authorship, Part I

Posted in General at 5:37 pm by Todd

What the web promised 10 years ago is now finally being delivered by blogs.

A decade ago, the emergence of the web as a media platform offered the possibility of turning the established publishing model on its head: since anyone could put up a website, the theory went, the playing field would be leveled and anyone who had something to say could set up their virtual soapbox and say it with a voice equal to that of the traditional players.

But it didn’t work out that way. While a number of new brands successfully established themselves as media outlets on the web (e.g., C|Net, Slate, etc.), the biggest voices on the web turned out to be the same ones that we’d already been familiar with before the web: The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mercury news, etc.

What happened to the early promise of the web? Where were the thousands of soap boxes? Why didn’t they materialize on the web as we knew it in, say, 2002?

It seems like there were several primary factors at work. First, it turned out that it wasn’t that easy to put together your own website. Sure, you could throw together a web server, pay an ISP to connect to the net, and start serving pages. But content management systems were expensive, hard to use, and difficult to deploy. People could (and did) use tools like Microsoft FrontPage to design and publish a set of pages, but those tools were designed for making content that was relatively static. Which was fine if your message was static, but a poor match if you wanted to publish on a regular ongoing basis.

The second factor that really impeded the popular revolution in online publishing was the lack of interactivity. An enterprising author could jump through the hoops required to get their message online, but once it was online, what was the experience like for readers? Any reader who happened to find some content on the web (see below) had an enitrely isolated experience. Had other people read the same material? Did people who read the material agree with the author? Did the author have his facts straight? Who was this author, anyway? It was really hard to know the answers to any of these questions, and that left a dark cloud over the experience of reading anything on the web published by anyone other than a known (typically a traditional media) publisher.

Discoverability was the third factor. If an author published some content online, how would readers find it? Word of mouth obviously played a large role here, but search engines were fundamental gateway to finding content online. In 2000, search engines like Yahoo! and Excite were racing toward ahead in pursuit of a “portal” strategy, whereby search services were offered to users as a kind of loss leader to attract eyeballs to other, more lucrative services. As a result, search services offered by these companies, frankly speaking, wasn’t that good.

The emergence of Google as a strong force helped to ameliorate some of these issues. At launch, Google focused on nothing but search; subjectively, their results were better than the current leaders as users reported being able to find what they were looking for more easily. And because Google’s PageRank algorithm caused “popular” pages to bubble to the top of their search results, readers were more likely to encounter material that had been read (and referenced) by others. As Google became increasingly popular, this way of ranking search results effected a substantial change on the web, as authors dealing with a given subject area essentially began competing with each other for broad acceptance (as expressed by third-party linkage) because winning that competition meant more readers.

But it was the emergence of two new tools — first blogging tools and then blog search that really opened the floodgates for individual authors. The success of blogging tools came as something of a surprise, as the technical innovation embodied by blogs was really quite minimal. After all, discussion boards (from which the blog concept evolved) had been around for years. By altering the mix ever so slightly, the creators of blog software found a recipe that content authors loved. Specifically, blogs offered the ability for content authors to own their own place where they could easily create their own content in their own style, and engage readers in a loosely controlled public discussion about that content. Add to that the trackback mechanism to allow authors to connect their blog postings with those of other blogs, and so-called “ping” mechanisms to alert aggregators of new content (to enable timely search), and you’ve got a real winner. These days, thousands of new blogs are created daily, and while many of those will wither, many others will flourish as new communities develop around them or existing communities link into them, weaving them into an ever-expanding fabric.

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