Dr. David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and has contributed to NPR's All Things Considered and the Harvard Business Review, among many other publications. He publishes an influential technology newsletter and a daily weblog, called JOHO, the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization.
Bruce Taylor spoke with Dr. Weinberger about the "long tail" of weblogging. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Bruce Taylor: Can you give us a state of the blogging phenomenon today and what it signals as a sea change culturally?
David Weinberger: I think there are some really interesting and important things about weblogs that explain both why they've been taken up not with just great rapidity, but with such enormous enthusiasm, and why the media is paying a peculiar kind of attention to them.
Clay Shirky's power law curve shows that there are a relative handful of weblogs that are very highly read, and then there's an elbow and the curve flattens out. And most weblogs, the vast, vast, vast majority of them (the long tail, as Chris Anderson of Wired called it) are read by a few people. So the media looks at that curve and it says, "Aha! On the left-hand side where the big-time bloggers are, those are being read by hundreds of thousands of people. They're like media. Weblogs are like media!" Maybe they're competitive, maybe they're helpful to media, but they look like media to the media. And so then the media asks, well, the media-ish questions like, are they credible, are they edited. Those are media questions that have very little to do with the social phenomenon of weblogging that is the long tail of weblogging.
Taylor: So when you say the social phenomena is the long tail, what do you mean by that? What's it signalling as opposed to the hockey stick part of the curve?
Weinberger: It's very hard to generalize, of course, because of the 5 to 10 million weblogs. I haven't read really all that many of them, you know. It's a big number. So you've got to take some guesses. And it seems to me that one of the reasons why weblogs are being maintained by people who have a handful of readers, as well as by people who have many readers, is that the weblogs are doing something for that person, and for the groups that form around the weblogs. So, for example, a big part of it is that weblogs are a way that we have a voice on the Web. And, in fact, not simply voice, because we had that before. We could have posted a Web page or joined a discussion group or whatever. Weblogs are persistent. That space stays there, and every day or five times a week or whatever it is, you update that page. And people come back to that page, and that page becomes sort of your proxy self on the Web.
The promise of the homepage was that we would have a persistent place that would be our Web presence. Well, now we do. And they're called weblogs, so weblogs are self, and they're self in conversation with others. So much of weblogging involves responding to other people or getting comments or linking to other people. So that's a big deal to have now a place that is a Web self that's created by writing and is created in conversation with other people. Of course that's a big deal. It doesn't have much to do with the media, though.
Taylor: Let's go over to the media side, because I think that is where there is a huge amount of interest right now. Here you have industrial, organized media terribly concerned and terribly interested in what's going on with this insurgency that they don't own and control. And then the other piece of that is how intrigued marketers and particularly PR people are in the use of blogs as a way to flog, rather than to inform or to share or communicate. Where are we going ethically with this?
Weinberger: It is certainly the case that PR firms are noticing weblogs. I've been talking with a few of them, and there's no doubt. And at first sight, it raises all of the worst PR instincts: Here are people talking about my products, my client's products, and so what is my role in life? It's to get more people to talk about my products, and to say what I want them to say. That's the instinct. But at least some of them are fighting that instinct, whether because they're enlightened or because they are afraid that if they try to work under the table to influence weblogs, they'll be outed and it will be a black eye. Occasionally, you hear about a marketing campaign that has tried to suborn blogging. And there are marketing campaigns that are perfectly straightforward about advertising, for example. But it's the product placement side of life that, I think, worries many of us.
