למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value.

It might take you only an hour to write a blog posting on some current controversy, but a thousand other people can do that as well (in fact, they'll sometimes do it better, as shown above). And customers don't want to pay for such a tiny increment of knowledge. Sure, sometimes a single paragraph holds the idea that can increase a site's conversion rate so much that a reader should have paid a million dollars to read it. But they don't know that in advance, so they won't pay.

In contrast, in-depth content that takes much longer to create is beyond the abilities of the lesser experts. A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours doesn't add up to Shakespeare. They'll actually create a thousand low-to-medium-quality postings that aren't integrated and that don't give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic -- even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs.

the sole reason for an expert’s activities are to further and advance his/her standing for financial gains. That is, the effort is meant to propel one’s business stature ahead, a game we are not all involved in by a large shot.

I write blogs (and wiki postings) to capture thoughts as they emerge over the event horizon of my richly and chaotically interconnected brain. Sometimes I get responses, sometimes I go in and edit them myself. But it's a process. Sometime later, I return to a posting, pick it up, dust it off, and start writing an article for publication based on a posting or two.

תוויות: בלוגים, הרהורים, כתיבה