Celebrating 6 Years of Blogging — Law Blogs & How the Online World Has Changed (Part II: Solving or Aggravating Information Overload?)
photo credit: Tanel via flickr
Today I’m continuing my sixth-blog-anniversary observations about the changes I’ve seen in blogging and Internet content, and my own meandering personal journey as a blogger. Part I of this personal history of blogging is here.
Blogs, Web 2.0, and Information Overload — Making the Problem Better or Worse?
I originally saw bloggers as “web sherpas,” guiding a growing, loyal audience to the latest and coolest stuff on the web in a particular subject-matter niche, and doing so with a personal touch.
This sort of knowledge management and sharing purpose drove many of the earliest bloggers, whose style has been described as follows:
The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. … These were web enthusiasts.
Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor’s commentary.
An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked.
As an online legal researcher ever since the dial-up DOS days of the early 80s, I thought that through my passion for digging and reading online, as a blogging attorney I’d do the heavy lifting for others who would regularly read my law blog and marvel at the great web content I uncovered.
For a while, I actually thought I could stay on top of all the blogs in areas related to employment law and HR. As I saw more and more of them sprout up around me, I figured I could perhaps avoid getting lost in the shuffle, maintain a central position, and serve a useful function by serving up links, excerpts, and comments each Monday to the previous week’s best material by other employment law and HR bloggers.
I found myself spending significant weekend time preparing HR/Employment Blogosphere Update. But quickly the growth became so rapid, and volume of employment content on blogs so great, that I had to give up.
Today, you can still conveniently peruse the “HR/Employment Blogosphere” by yourself on my “Interactive Blogroll” (it may take a minute to load, it’s so full of relevant blogs).
The explosive growth of blogging leads me to wonder whether we all aren’t just making information overload much, much worse.
The flood of online content has become a tsunami.
I know I can’t possibly keep up with all the blogs in my blogroll — just one relatively narrow corner of the blogosphere!
But there’s another way to look at the problem. As user-created content has grown exponentially during the years I’ve been blogging, tools for searching, finding, organizing, following, and distributing it have also undergone drastic change and improvement.
The ultimate balance seems to be a much greater diversity of online content than during the pre-blog era, with an ever-increasing ability to obtain the specialized content one wants — when and where one wants it.
Search Engines, SEO, and RSS
Blogs Trump Conventional SEO
As I said in Part I of this series, shortly after I began blogging I discovered that search engines just love blogs.
That fact did not remain a secret for long, and it quickly became conventional wisdom that one of the best ways to create a website that would rank well in search, bringing free traffic, was to set it up as a blog or connect it to a blog. Lawyers were learning this too, and beginning to blog in droves.
Meanwhile, experts in search engine optimization (SEO) were charging thousands of bucks to engage in all sorts of legitimate and illegitimate manipulation of conventional websites that would increase search traffic. But plain-Jane blogs with lots of good content, frequently updated, often beat out costly SEO efforts.
Blogs Have to Use SEO Techniques to Keep Up
Then the field started to become so crowded that this was no longer enough. It wasn’t as simple as beating out static websites simply by having a blog — not when hundreds of blogs started showing up in search results.
Now it wasn’t just static website owners vs. bloggers; it was bloggers vs. bloggers. Smart SEO practices became essential in order for a blog to pull down the most search traffic. And the name of the game became “how to get free traffic to your blog.”
RSS Solves Information Overload — Kind Of
Blogs had initially seemed a solution to this problem — relative to simply searching the web, as I mentioned above — but now their incredible proliferation had simply made matters worse. We went from “too much web content, too little time” to “a few great blogs point me to all the best web content” to “too many blogs, too little time” — all in the space of a year or two.
RSS and aggregators like bloglines promised to allow review of “hundreds of stories and blog entries in less than half the time it would take using a browser and a favorites list.”
Well, I started using Bloglines and pretty soon clogged it up with so many feeds I had — you guessed it — information overload! “Too many RSS feeds, too little time!”
Nonetheless, RSS is a great thing. Used with a bit of moderation, it can create great at-a-glance customized personal news pages, for example, and blogs and websites can use it to create newsfeed widgets.
Social Bookmarking — The Next Big Thing
As I fell further and further behind in my efforts to stay on top of and blog about all kinds of interesting online reading connected with the subjects of this blog — despite RSS — along came the social bookmarking sites.
I found these exciting because they allowed me to at least preserve and “tag” (assign keywords to) items of interest — and access these bookmarks from any computer (in contrast to regular bookmarks stored on an individual computer’s browser).
I chose to use delicious. Lo and behold, delicious creates RSS feeds for every tag, so I could create topical feeds for display on my blog just by using topical tags.
They now appear under “George’s Micro-Blogs” at right. And you can subscribe to them here.
Many other ways for busy websurfers to organize their information and combat information overload (or at least information clutter) come online frequently.
Just the other day, I discovered another one to try: iLighter, which uses a highlighter and “sticky note” approach, combined with a flexible foldering system for storing not just links, but also excerpts from web pages.
In Part III: Different visions of blogs and blogging and how they apply to blogs by lawyers (blawgs).
Additional Resources
- Roundtable by four long-time St. Louis blogging lawyers (including me): A Blogging Guide for St. Louis (and Other) Lawyers (and Others)
- Internet Resources on Information Overload and Productivity
- Beating Information Overload with News Aggregators
- Master Your Information Manifesto: 21 Tips to Deal with Info Overload
- Social Bookmarking Apps Provide a New Knowledge Management Platform
George, congratulations on six years of excellent writing and great content. I’ve always considered your blog to be an exemplar of the craft of legal blogging.
I also want to salute your collegiality and friendly support of fellow bloggers – I will never forget the kindness you showed me and your patient willingness to answer all kinds of questions in my own early days at the keyboard when I was still using Blogger and trying to figure things out. Thanks for continuing to inspire legal bloggers like me. Here’s to six more years, George!
Warm wishes from Boston,
Diane