Fred Wilson noted this morning that his blog has dropped off the Techmeme Leaderboard. While not denying the possibility that his own content may have something to do with this, he notes that the leaderboard is tending away from individual blogs and toward multiple-author blogs.
Mainstream media wants to be part of the conversation as they should… The other thing that has changed is that many of the blogs I “grew up” with are not individual blogs anymore. Rafat has a team, Arrington has a team, Om has a team. ARS, RRW, SAI, Valleywag are all group blogs. They are much better at putting out a stream of blog posts all day long, but they aren’t the same thing as Mike and Om blogging along with me.
Om Malik responded, pointing out some of the ways in which he is still a blogger, GigaOm is still a blog, and he and his team honor the importance of the personal voice.
The conversation about Techmeme and blogs has been going on for a while now. About a month and a half ago, Read/Write Richard made a particularly interesting contribution.
Read/WriteWeb isn’t a blog and hasn’t been for some time – at least in the classic definition of a blog as a personal journal. For quite some months now, I’ve been referring to Read/WriteWeb as a “media business” or a “media property”. R/WW used to be a blog, back when I was the only writer and I blogged in the evenings. But sometime last year, it became my full-time job. Then it became a business, and now it’s a media property.
Let me clarify one thing though – I’m still a “blogger”, as are Marshall and Josh and the other R/WW writers. But Read/WriteWeb has evolved into something different than a blog, which is traditionally thought of as the voice of a single person. Dave Winer, one of the pioneers of blogging, also says that the voice must be unedited. This is clearly not the case with R/WW, which has multiple bloggers and also a strong editorial stance. The same is true at Techcrunch, Gigaom, PaidContent et al.
One of the reasons that this is on my mind at the moment is that I recently pitched a piece to Richard. We emailed back and forth a few times about whether it should be my second guest piece on RWW (here’s the first). We decided that it works better as a post on a personal blog, and so it ended up here.