I read John Stewart's America (The Book) a while ago and it was a pretty good laugh. One of the best pages of the book was the gameplan employed by the 24 hours news networks:
" 7 minutes actual news, 3 minutes breaking news, 25 minutes breaking newsgraphics, 22 minutes temperatures highs and lows in places you don't live....6 hours commercials....4 hours re-run crap from earlier in the day."
It seems like the same principles can be applied to the webosphere as well. When there is no breaking news, the big name bloggers try to hold on to news from the past and reshape it. Remember after Facebook released their platform, and then the other social networks tried to catch up. It seemed like that dominated techmeme for 2 - 3 months. Over the past two weeks, I have been reviewing friendfeed and twitter and it is amazing that most of my connections have been discussing the value of one service over the other. I think it is great for Friendfeed and Twitter that they get this free marketing service, but that is the type of discussion most people in a meeting would say "let's take it offline" (another name for let's never bring it up again). I know I have the ability to ignore those messages, and move on to the next interesting thing and I am doing just that. However, it's just a bit concerning when it becomes harder and harder to find great content. The long tail of blogs is accessible if you know what you are looking for and leverage the power of search but hard to discover via a tool like techmeme or digg nowadays.
It almost seems like any post put on techcrunch is going to show up on techmeme nowadays and it is almost guaranteed that other big name bloggers will put a minor spin on techcrunch's post on their own sites. This is perfectly legal and the beauty of giving everyone the ability to express themselves in a way to share their thoughts with the world but the content is becoming more vanilla. It is going to be interesting in the blogosphere as the popular bloggers get more popular, and the bloggers just trying to make a name for themselves get lost out on the cloud. As fewer sources contribute to material accessible on aggregation services such as techmeme and provide their viewpoint, we need someone with John Stewart's talent to bring a sense of humor and realness to everything.
Disclaimer: This is just my opinion that content seems to be becoming homogeneous across all the blogs that I used to visit on a frequent basis. I used to derive a great deal of satisfaction checking out my google reader blogroll and analyzing information that was dissected in so many different ways, and that just seems to be lacking currently. Maybe, I am just not looking at the best set of blogs or following the right people on tools such as twitter or friendfeed.
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