Just an open musing about media consumption patterns. My infonutrition has changed radically in recent times.
Firstly, my browsing pattern could be characterised as “bimodal”: graze mode and discover mode. You could think of this as “I don’t know what I want” and “I know what I want” modes.
The former is when you just idly flick through blogs and news posts, much as you would browse book spines in a bookshop.
I rarely start any such grazing journey at traditional big media news sites. I use the blogosphere as my filter. If it hasn’t been linked to, it probably isn’t that interesting. I know where the strongest distillate is to be found in the blogosphere. And for any story, there may be multiple reports and angles from the mainstream media; I want to only read the best. Have a negative opinion after reading an online article? Blog it, save 100 other people some effort.
My RSS reader is my field for grazing. Anything that doesn’t fit that model generally gets rejected. The only exception is a site like BBC News, which has a specific information architecture for the rapid viewing of news stories and accompanying images. So if you aren’t adding value with your information architecture, and aren’t integrating transactions in with content, why bother having a web site at all other than to get crawled by Google?
Naturally, anyone who hides their content behind a big pay wall, or does something stupid like embed session IDs in the URL, effectively ceases to exist to he blogosphere. It’s the archives that should be free to read, not the new stuff! And paying readers to mass-market content should be able to embed blog links that are free for their readers to follow.
The discovery mode is when I see something that interests me and I want to find out more. “I wonder if…” Increasingly I note that online forums contain many of the best answers. Although we have Google for the Web, and Technorati for the blogosphere, we don’t have an effective forasphere search tool. Part of the problem is forum posts don’t link to each other, making it harder to discern where authority lies, and nullifying PageRank-type algorithms. (If blogs are microcontent, are forums nanocontent?)
Sorry, no deep and meaningful conclusions. Just a straight brain to keyboard thought dump.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 09:12 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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