The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging
Tech bloggers (and I put myself squarely in this group), I am sorry to report that many of us have become lazy - really lazy. So, with this in mind I offer a challenge: in 2008 let's strap back on our thinking caps and get our blog mojo back. Let's kill the Lazysphere once and for all.
The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won't name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another "me too" blog post. Their goal is largely to land on Techmeme and sometimes digg - perhaps Google in an archival/Long Tail perspective. These sites - and Twitter too - have perpetuated a lot of lackadaisical writing. The Attention Crash is another factor at work here. People don't have as much time to think.
If you want to see the Lazysphere in the wild, I encourage you to take a look a two resources. The first is this terrific video that Amit Argawal put together. It distills 50 hours in the life of Techmeme down to 50 seconds. It shows how often bloggers will gather like a pack of wolves around news that will be largely forgotten in a month. The other is digg swarm.
Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted - at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to simply regurgitating the same old news over and over again, often with very little value add. It's almost like we stopped the real work of reading, thinking and writing in favor of going all herd, all the time.
My blogging New Year's resolution is to quit The Lazysphere. I can't go cold turkey reading it, but I aim to avoid using my blog to perpetuate it. To inspire me (and perhaps you) I have started a category of feeds in my Google Reader that include a group of people I feel really think - and do so often. You can browse or subscribe to the feed stream here. A list follows below. I plan to add or subtract to these over time.
Who's with me? Can we kill the Lazysphere this year? That's a challenge that I feel is vital to the future of blogging.
