There is a bit of a discussion sparked by Seth Godin's post about the clutter of too many posts from bloggers trying to activate search engine returns by having the most recent posts. The A-listers caqn't stop posting or they'll drop in the rankings. And many bloggers fall into that hamster-wheel phenomena. Here's a bit of his view:
"But blogs... you can easily post 100 times a day. With a team, it might be a thousand.
This wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that in many cases, volume leads to traffic. Take a look at the top 10 blogs and you'll notice that many of them post dozens of times a day.
Just like the marketers of Oreo (now in 19 flavors of cookies) we're dealing with clutter by making more clutter.
RSS fatigue is already setting in. While multiple posts get you more traffic, they also make it easy to lose loyal readers."
The clutter in personal media makes it difficult for anyone to find anything....even with tagging. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 rejects the notion that there is too much or that anyone should show restraint. The solution, for him, lies in powerful metadata:
"The problem right now is not that there’s too much content, but that the filters are still too primitive and Old Media is still clinging to control of its content, reducing the “liquidity” of the network.
So the answer is definitely NOT to produce less content, but to completely liberate content, load it up with metadata, and let content consumers interact with it and draft off it in every way, shape, and form."
Ultimately, I agree with Seth that over time blogs will find a loyal readership through posting meaningful, thoughtful, resourceful posts. Metadata won't solve the problem. A last word from Seth:
"Small addendum: some have rightly pointed out that filters and tagging mean that the commons benefits from as much noise as possible... that each blogger blogs all she wants, and the good stuff gets dugg or tagged and the rest disappears.
I have no real argument with that, except that it begs the question of who's looking through the chaff for the wheat. If someone has a blog where every single riff is a good one, you can bet that the eager beaver taggers are going to be there, waiting for the good stuff. If, on the other hand, you have a one in a thousand hit rate, the odds of your good stuff being found are small indeed. I think what I'm suggesting (not proposing... I'm not asking you to post less!) is that if you want to have a larger voice, it may pay be to be your own filter."
T
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