Musing about The Long Tail
Category: MSM/Journalism/etc... Navel Gazing...
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005 at 01:59 PM [GMT-6]

The more I think about Dave Sifry's post regarding the distribution and diversity of blogs and implications for Main Stream Media, the less compelling I find the arguments. The data is too incomplete or tainted to support any serious conclusions on way or the other.

OK, so it's the best we have. That's not an excuse for using it as a foundation for a world view. I'm not even sure that it's useful for highlighting trends. And I see absolutely nothing in the data that supports statements like this: "In fact, even though the amount of influence that a single blog may have is less than that of a single blog on the A-list, the aggregate influence of all of the long tail far outstrips even the mainstream media."

What about the "long tail" of the mainstream media? It's there, you know, in the form of thousands of small local or regional dailies or weeklies. It's there in the form of hundreds -- if not thousands -- of niche magazines and journals, some of which are online, many of which aren't. How does one measure the collective impact...the aggregate influence...of those media outlets on the public at-large?

Then there's the problem of properly categorizing the blogs that make up both the A-list and the long tail. As some commenters on Mr. Sifrey's post have observed, some of those blogs really aren't. They're spam and/or porn, or they don't really fit a classification that can be validly compared to an MSM outlet. And according to Michelle Malkin, Mr. Sifrey himself acknowledges that 45% of the 7 million blogs in Technorati's index haven't been updated in six months. Gee, that would seem to be a real damper on the influence of those 3.15 million blogs, wouldn't you think?

And, finally, there's the nagging problem of using links to measure impact, instead of actual readership. I link to scores of blogs which I rarely if ever read. I read many more to which I have no links (Lileks is a good example and I have a hundred others on RSS feed). If you have a blog, I'm sure you do the same thing. How does this factor into the big picture? Beats me, and I suspect no one else knows, either.

The bottom line is that the only thing this Technorati-derived data does is highlight the immense diversity of information sources now available to us. Any other conclusions are a stretch.