Tapping into the wisdom of crowds

 If you start a blog today, it competes for attention with tens of thousands that get added each day to the millions already in blogosphere. So the notion that a blog opens a window to the world has to be tempered with the realisation that it is a very tiny window, getting tinier by the day.

And yet, you can find many examples of bloggers who seem to have a feel for the medium that makes them much more effective than the vast majority. The first thing to notice about them is their clarity about why they blog.

Dan Gillmor, who currently runs the centre for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona state university’s school of journalism, was one of the first journalists to start a blog. He has a simple-sounding credo: “My readers know more than I do.”

What that meant for him as a columnist was to raise provocative questions in his blog on topics he wanted to write about, and use the ensuing debates to develop his ideas. He took that to another level when he wrote a book, ‘We the Media’, whose drafts he posted online, and modified with feedback.

“People corrected mistakes, added nuance and in several cases made excellent suggestions leading to major revisions. Again and again I've seen that the knowledge of the audience is of great value for any journalist,” Gillmor told DNA.

Tapping the “wisdom of crowds” is just one of the ways blogs have now begun to be used both by individuals and organisations. Many of them, especially tech blogs, have also become very profitable.

But the real value of a blog, points out Gillmor, may lie in the way it can build one’s public presence: “I don't make any money now on my various blogs, but they are an essential part of who I am professionally.”

Public presence has its downsides, however. Robert Scoble, best known for blogging about Microsoft while he used to work there, lamented in a recent post about how puerile comments were getting on blogs, dealing a blow to the very conversationality that drives them.

Like a lot else on the internet, blogging too is beset with a problem of plenty. Technorati, a blog-tracking site, puts it at 1,75,000 new blogs each day, and many of them will be personal diaries that dry up after a few months, especially now with the competing claims of social networking.

Sites like GlobalVoicesOnline try to counter this growing cacophony by amplifying blogs with fresh perspective, but their value is unclear. “There's really no way of knowing if we meet our objectives. We just need to examine what we link to on an everyday basis. And listen to our readers,” admitted Neha Viswanathan, regional editor for India in GlobalVoicesOnline.

She says picking good blogs to read is something you have to develop – “Almost the way someone develops a reading habit by going to the library. You ask for recommendations. You borrow some, but return them without reading them entirely.”

Nearly a decade after blogging took off with friendly software, it appears that both bloggers and their readers are having a rethink about how they want to invest their time.

c_sumit@dnaindia.net