Even as the size of the blogosphere continues to burgeon, I’m finding it increasingly hard to find high quality blog content. The signal-to-noise ratio has decreased, but the filtering technologies just haven’t caught up. Today, if you want to find original, insightful content on most topics, you’ll probably do a lot better perusing the shelves at your friendly neighborhood library than trawling through the oceans of endless blogs.
There are several reasons for this. People tend put a lot more thought and effort into a book than they would into a blog post. And while it’s technically possible today to self-publish, for the most part books still need to survive the scrutiny of publishing houses to get meaningful publicity & distribution, which puts a floor on the quality of what makes it into your public library.
But the most significant problem for blogs, I believe, is the lack of any ranking system that actually works. In comparison, it’s much easier to separate the wheat from the chaff from a mountain of books. A simple & effective yardstick is how well a book sells – when people have to open up their wallets, they’re making a tangible vote of confidence in what they’re expecting to get in return.
One way to augment that yardstick is by also taking into account when the book was published. Any book that came to press decades ago but is still selling like hotcakes probably has something pretty compelling within its covers.
Today, there are at least a couple of ways that blogs are ranked. The first is by harnessing social energy, but that has been shown to be vulnerable to manipulation. The second is algorithmic approaches which try (and mostly fail) to return both relevant & quality content. One of the better tools I’m stumbled across is filtrbox, but there’s still considerable room for improvement.
One way or another, I think there’s a lot of value in building a service that can, for a particular topic, bubble up the best of the blogosphere. I certainly would pay for it. And I think lots of other people & businesses would too.
