Shooting at Bubbles

One of the constant complaints you will hear about blogging, especially within the tech world, is that we are constantly repeating .. and repeating .. and repeating .. the same old stories that first get published by the top tier blogs. To be clear this doesn’t include things like splogs and scrapers since those can’t be classified as blogs of any value the charge to a very large degree is justified.

It’s also a charge that the mainstream media likes to lord over us lowly bloggers. Ya, like we don’t know that they all use Associated Press or Reuters sanitized articles to fill out the blank spaces thereby justifying their advertising rates. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

As irritating as this constant regurgitation of the same news is, there is really no escaping it. After all, consider the incredible amount of information a typical blogger takes in during the course of a day (and it only increases the further up the food chain they go). Myself, I currently have close to 300 RSS feeds I monitor in a day of which I would estimate that some 70% of those feeds update multiple times a day.

This might seem like a lot, but I know of bloggers who would consider that just scratching the surface of what they read. Now toss in Twitter streams, Google Reader Shared Items, Facebook pages and God knows how many other incidental sources of information. All this has to be processed at some level and decisions made about what to write something on plus the fact that we have to make sure that it is current and interesting.

Chowing down on the smörgåsbord of information

Granted, on blogs like this one and other individual blogs there isn’t the same emphasis of having to write about the hot meme of the day hour minute. We can be far more selective and really dig into the things that interest us while still trying to remain as current as possible – after all even for small blogs the eyballs are important.

However when it comes to writing for a living and being on staff of a news type blog there is the pressure to meet quotas and to do our best to ride the crest of the hot trends happening – and changing – every minute of the day. This means having to write about things that won’t always interest us (have you ever tried to write about something you couldn’t careless about?) because we need to keep those eyeballs rolling in.

Tossing around the leftovers

As a result we end up repeating a lot of what has already been written. Still in the cases where it is something we might find even slightly interesting we try to add our own spin but the fact is we are regurgitating news. In this aspect we are no different that say the New York Times or Washington Post with their republishing of AP or Reuters content and we don’t hate on them when we read the same news in 5 different newspapers or listen to the same story on three or four different news networks.

We might think that there is an incredible amount of news and information that is flowing through our lives on a daily bases what with blogs, 24 hour news channels and Twitter news flashes; however the reality is much different. For all the apparent flood we actually have very little news – especially in the tech sector – truly happening in any given day or week – it just seems like we do.

What we do have though is an incredibly large number of content providers spread across a wide variety of platforms. From television to radio and from newspapers to blogs with a liberal dose of Twitter and Facebook thrown in for good measure. It is inevitable that a large portion of those content providers are going to end up with the table scraps.

Spewing forth the cud

One of the favorite cons of the blogosphere is that it’s okay to regurgitate all that same old stuff as long as you add your own opinions into the mix. As well, we are told to find our niche and be passionate about it. That’s okay up to a point if you are an indie blogger and you do manage to find yourself  a niche that no-one else is writing passionately about.

However just how many niches do you think are really out there still waiting to be discovered?

At some point even the niches will get over populated and you are back to square one. Granted as I said above it is much easier for indie bloggers to delve deep into subjects and make it personal – except when of course all the hot tips say to keep it short.

You ever tried to condense serious thought into pablum-like four or five short (read two or three sentences) paragraphs. I have and let me tell you it is not as easy as it sounds and nor is it as fulfilling – to you or me.

For the news blogs though it is nearly impossible to keep up with the kinds of quotas need to justify both the advertising and investment. At some point regardless of size you are going to find them all having to regurgitate the hot topics of the day hour minute. This isn’t a choice but rather a necessity.

Cleaning up the mess

Look, I hate the regurgitation as much as the next person but I am also seeing the situation from all three sides and as much as it might suck, whining about it (as I have in the past) incessantly isn’t going to help in any way. Bitching about the repetitiveness of news in the blogosphere makes as much sense – with the same amount of success – as beating our chest over traditional media’s same behavior.

This doesn’t mean however that we should throw up our hands in collective surrender. It does mean though that as much as you, the reader, might really dislike reading the same thing over and over again there is the flip side where as content producers we probably like it even less. We would all like to break news and offer up insightful commentary but in most cases there isn’t enough breaking news (in the real traditional sense) in a day to let us.

As for the insightful commentary and opinions .. well you’re the one’s that keep telling us that you want it short and full of fluff because if you really did want more then we wouldn’t see ridiculous post of mindless crap getting hundreds or thousands of retweets just because it was posted on some big brand blog. It’s called engagement folks and that I am sorry to say is your responsibility. Sometimes we as content providers can only give as good as we get.