It’s hard to resist adding my $0.02 in a debate about blogging like the one Nick Carr started this week with his post on The Great Unread, the story of the royal hierarchy in the blogosphere:

“As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite.”

It’s definitely worth a read if you blog. If you don’t, it’s more echo chamber music, as is this post.

I suspect that the idea of the blogosphere and the blog elite is a temporary one. The blogger hierarchy does not make the substance of a post any more or less valuable. Ultimately, that value is completely up to me, not some shallow power structure.

I’m hoping that instead of reinforcing global hiearchical power structures that things like recommendation engines, personalization services, syndication and filtering algorithms will weed out the crap and bubble up what matters to me, empowering me to own my media experience.

Popular blogs, podcasts and videos will become just a sidebar to my daily intake when their relevance to my world is only tangential.

I respect what Jay Rosen says (and Nick, for that matter), but his posts are too long for me. I need the blogs I read regularly to filter out which of Jay’s posts are worth spending the time to read. I’m impressed not just by the quality of the posts Jeff Jarvis generates but also the volume. Again, I need an interestingness filter on Jeff’s posts to surface the ones that matter to me.

Yet all of Jay’s and Jeff’s influence on my thinking about journalism and media has no bearing whatsoever on the music I listen to, the basketball teams I follow or the technologies I find interesting.

What Nick rightly points out is that there will be an increasing tendency for people to publish for the sake of fame and fortune which will dilute the pool of interesting things out there. This is the popularity problem.

Perhaps I’m just optimistic. But it seems reasonable to expect that we’ll find technology answers to this issue, automatic ways to subvert wasteful power structures that may be forming in the world of personal media.

I find it a bit presumptuous that someone would try to end a discussion on a topic in the blogosphere or, for that matter, assume that they drive a conversation in the market.

In an attempt to stop people blabbing endlessly about bloggerism vs journalism, Steven Berlin Johnson redefined the 5 points of the debate, recapping Jay Rosen’s closing arguments on the topic from over a year ago. His post was a response to Nichalos Lehmann’s article Amateur Hour — Journalism without journalists in The New Yorker questioning the value of blogging:

“Jay Rosen tried to kill off this kind of discussion a year or two ago with his smart essay, Bloggers Versus Journalists Is Over, but obviously it didn’t stick. So let me propose a slightly more blunt approach.”

Similarly, it seems odd to me that Malcolm Gladwell has decided that blog commentary is merely derivitive of mainstream media conversation:

“Any form that consists, chiefly, of commentary and criticism is derivative. We need derivative media sources to help us make sense of what we learn from primary sources.

…although it maybe possible for some bloggers to think of their thoughts as rising, fully formed, from the blogosphere, it just ain’t so. Even people who do not think of themselves as being influenced by the agenda of traditional media actually are: they are simply influenced by someone who is influenced by someone who is influenced by old media.”

He makes this statement in response to Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame (and Conde Nast’s Wired magazine). Chris used a comment Malcolm made to reinforce the point that mainstream media is not as powerful as it thinks it is:

“What we do has great value, but we no longer have a monopoly on leading the public conversation (not that we ever did, of course, but it was easier to delude ourselves before). The blogosphere doesn’t need us to give them something to talk about. When we do what we do well and add new ideas, information and analysis, blogs can be our best friend, amplifying our reach many-fold. But when we don’t, the former audience is very happy to talk amongst itself.”

There’s a bit of chicken and egg here, as I’m not sure it’s clear whose work is derivitive of whose.

A good reporter is a story teller of other people’s experiences. Nothing in the Wall Street Journal happens because the Wall Street Journal said it did. A good media company like the Wall Street Journal is able to catalyze important events and thinking happening in interesting places into meaningful and valuable chunks with a consistent lens, and there’s no doubt the Wall Street Journal influences what people think about.

But that role in not exclusive, even when their coverage of a topic is considered the best in its class or costs a ton of money or takes a lot of research to get right.

The conversations the Wall Street Journal covers are reflections of conversations that in many cases started years prior, and it’s not until the topic reaches some kind of tipping point does the Wall Street Journal then translate it for their lens of the world.

I would never deny being influenced by mainstream media. But that’s more a result of the fact that I have shared experiences with people than because the influence is meaningful or relevant. In fact, it becomes less and less relevant the more my media experience diversifies.

I agree with Steven that this particular topic lacks the juice it used to have. Jay Rosen has done a brilliant job of turning the discourse into a cohesive string that matters and feels complete from my personal perspective and obviously for Steven’s.

But closure for us may also mean it’s time for some fresh perspective to alter the dialog or extend it in sensible ways for other people yet untouched by it or confirm the premise of the argument with more useful research.

The effects of disintermediating media are still unfolding, and I’m betting that leaders at most big media companies will get more clarity on how to deal with that problem from each other and the individuals they know at competing companies or even their neighbors than they will from reading about it in their own publications.

Several authors have proven that blogs are a great complement to writing and then selling a book. They are also excellent companions to operating and marketing a business.

Colin Roche, entrepreneur and inventor of the PenAgain, began publishing a blog this week in response to some big buzz generated by an article in the Wall Street Journal last week. The piece was about how the Wal-Mart distribution system works for product developers from a small businessman’s perspective. The small businessman in this case was Colin with his PenAgain.

The PenAgain story is great. A guy has an idea for a radical new pen…while in detention in high school. He prototypes it in his garage. He gets investment to produce it several years later. Then he hits the streets and sells and sells and sells.

Right now is the point in the story just before he hits it big…or does he?

“During the trial, PenAgain will get space in the special displays, known as “end caps,” at the edge of aisles, in the thick of consumer traffic. The prime positioning will give the product a fighting chance: After 30 days, the stores need to sell close to 85% of the 48,000 pens Wal-Mart ordered if the product is to be considered for wider distribution throughout the chain.”

Part of Colin’s strategy so far has been about paying close attention to what people think of his product. He is constantly watching people use his pen and listening to their advice. And I’ve seen what happens firsthand. There is no shortage of advice for a guy that is trying to launch a product that people can hold in their hands and buy on a supermarket shelf. Everyone has an opinion for Colin.

So, it makes sense that he step into the blog world and open up that dialog to a much wider pool of opinions. I’m hopeful he’ll entertain us and inform us about the entrepreneur’s journey.

For example, he needs to give us performance reports and share the tactics that work and the ones that don’t work. He should give us insight into what his day is like and what the market is doing. People will want to know how many pens and how many distributors he has to work with so that other entrepreneurs can compare notes. They’ll want to know price pressure, competive details and lessons in distribution.

Most importantly, for blogging to have an impact, he needs to consider the people who share their thoughts with him in the blogosphere as trusted advisors.

John Battelle mastered the art of integrating a blog into the author’s writing process. He posted thoughts daily and watched people react. He let them inform him and correct him. He then incorporated those discoveries into the story that became his book. And when his book finally shipped he had an instant base of buyers and marketers.

Unfortunately, John hasn’t adopted the same approach for his new business. Perhaps Colin can show us how it’s done for a startup.

Disclosure: I’m a friend and advisor to these guys.

Somebody recently referred to MySpace as “Outlook for teenagers”. Wow, what an interesting way to visualize the paradigm shift.

I had trouble grasping why it was that kids were referring to their MySpace experience using phrases that imply addiction, but this expression broke down that mental block for me. We can all relate to moments when you’re pounding the “Check Mail” button in your email app.

Of course, you can’t reduce MySpace to such a simple generalization without missing some other key trends that serve it well.

There’s something fascinating about watching people react to what you post online. I do the same thing after I post something in my blog that I hope people read. I start checking technorati and watching my referrer logs more closely. People who add Wikipedia entries closely monitor the evolution of those pages as others contribute to it. People who post questions on Answers keep checking their question to see who has responded.

I would bet that people are often more interested in who responds than what the reponse is.

Feedback is validation, and there’s no age group that cares more about validation than teenagers. It can be a paralyzing experience for the less confident, but the Internet creates a nice layer of distance and control that provides a more comfortable home and even a canvas for anyone who can express himself or herself.

Mike Butcher drew an interesting picture of the portal landscape in his Netimperitive column, “Goodbye and good luck”. He asked how Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft were going to address the need for people to control their online identities:

“In this new world where there is no true ‘one-stop-shop’ for everything; where people subscribe to feeds from a myriad of places; where sites themselves are turning into mashups of other sites and none of us goes to one place any more (OK, so we never did, but this is now a fundamental and unbreakable trend); what do portals DO?…

The fight will now become one of identity as portals which used to control your ID because you were literally ‘walled in’ now try to win you over with identity tools locked into their ecosystem.”

MySpace caught the big guys asleep at the wheel, though they run the same risk of controlling identity against people’s wills.

Another reason MySpace works is because no other service before it was enabling teenagers to build a fully customizable identity and to use that identity to interact with other teenagers. There are lots of platforms for socializing online, but none prior to MySpace gave kids the ability to build an evolving reflection of themselves. Avatars are neat, but there’s so much more to expressing teenage drama than altering your shirt.

As Jeremy Zawodny noted, the theoretical WebOS concept already exists. It’s on MySpace where you can install apps from other online services in the form of badges, buttons and visual doodads that spice up your site:

I recently came across something that completely changed the way I think about the idea of a Web OS. Over on the Flickr Ideas forum, I came across a posting titled Flickr is NOT MySpace compatible… please make a javascript free “Badge”.

Take a minute and think about the language that Daniel used there. It the exact same sort of complaint you might have heard 5 or 10 years ago about a desktop application. ‘Is CoolNewGame compatible with my Mac?’”

I thought the blogging craze would have enabled this world for teenagers, and from what I know about LiveJournal, this is exactly what was happening. But a handful of common user interface elements and an email platform pulled all the right pieces together to create the MySpace explosion in a way that blogging just wasn’t serving.

The opportunity to disintermediate MySpace certainly exists if someone can figure out how to couple the independence of a domain owned and controlled by a user along with the communication platform that unifies the way people can give feedback and validation to eachother that’s integrated into the experience.

Comments and trackbacks aren’t enough, obviously. And too much control will confuse the masses.

It’s a fine balance that MySpace nailed, but it’s also a precarious position. I imagine we’ll see MySpace cementing their market share by locking down their brand value before competitors figure out how to lure away their users with better offerings. They obviously need to initiate that effort with some better PR.

The San Francisco Chronicle has been doing some really innovative things recently. They’ve begun printing blog entries from their web site in the daily print edition. It’s good reading that rounds out the wire stories nicely. Every print publisher should be doing this.

They’ve also been printing the front page of the paper as it was 100 years ago in memory of the damage done by the Great Quake. Though many references are meaningless, you can imagine life in 1906, which, in some cases, doesn’t sound all that different to the world today. Here’s a particularly gruesome tidbit from 100 years ago:

COLORADO SPRINGS, April 24. - Passing through this city to-day on a Denver and Rio Grande train, bound for Chicago, where her parents reside, was a San Francisco fugitive who said her name was Miss Logan. She wore a bandage on her left hand and said that while she lay unconcious upon the floor of the lobby of the St. Francisco Hotel in San Frncisco after the earthquake last Wednesday morning the third finger of her left hand was cut off and she was robbed of rings that she wore there.