Thursday, December 14, 2006

are blogs scalable?

... growing pains or falling apart? (2 comments of mine + 1 response from Robert Fienman)

MORE: my posts

Robert,

Sounds more like growing pains to me than falling apart; I agree that it doesn’t seem to be scalable (in the sense of having a huge number of people participating in the same discussion — at some point it just breaks down) but isn’t there an easy fix for that? it seems to me that limiting the number of participants to whatever is deemed to be the optimum would solve that problem…


Delia


P.S. And yes, you can’t keep track of them all… but is that necessary?




Robert,


Of course you can’t do that (it’s a very different medium); you can use filtering tools the type clearthought mentioned but you are still not going to be able to “keep track of them all”… I don’t think that’s the goal. It’s more like, you want to get as much of what you regard to be “the good stuff” as you can within the time you have available.


re: “I also doubt any blog wants to limit the amount of traffic it gets”


well, if they *keep* getting the level of traffic they need with truck loads of people just mumbling to themselves instead to talking to each other…. they are probably not going to change… but I suspect at some point people are going to drift off to more hospitable (better set-up) places.
I wouldn’t expect it to decrease traffic — on the contrary, the idea would be to just *split* the large number of interested people in group sizes that make sense… so they can talk with each other and enjoy the interaction — the resultant traffic should *increase* (something tells me that the thrill of talking to oneself wares off fast but I could be wrong…)


Delia

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