A reader, Michael, responds to my earlier post on micro-fame as the new model for user satisfaction in blogging.  Michael, playing devil's advocate, makes a good point: blogs could become the personal home pages of 2004/5: boring, amateurish, and mostly abandoned.

Luckily, I think this is an entirely avoidable outcome because blogs are different from homepages. 

Blogs have a vitality that homepages generally lack: blogs provide a simple but dynamic rapid-response platform for people to post about their lives, opinions, hobbies, etc.  Also, as my friend, Jason, points out, blogs are technically easy to manage so virtually everyone can leverage this technology. 

Most importantly, blogs invite people into the blogger's life and become a key way for others to share in the blogger's life.  In many ways, blogs have the same dynamic, "living document" role that the refrigerator door has in many homes:  provide a central communications hub where information and content constantly reflect, augment, and update the lives of the household's residents.   A blogger's family, friends, or fellow enthusiasts become the micro-community where the blogger enjoys micro-fame and the community benefits from the continuity the blog provides.  A win for everyone.

In contrast, homepages are generally very static, like a document that is fixed in time.  This fixed, un-updated quality makes them lack relevance in the hustle and bustle of most of our lives.  There is usually very little reason to revisit a homepage after you have been there once.  Also, many homepages can be technically difficult to manage, are often very dull, and most just become ghost-sites that no one ever visits. 

All that being said, it is not a given that new bloggers will grok how blogging can augment their lives right off the bat.  The challenge for mass market blogosphere proponents still remains: how to help the early majority adopters/bloggers learn how to meaningfully incorporate blogging into their lives.   We need to figure out how to educate these new bloggers so they do not simply try it for a while, not really get the point or purpose/benefits, and then quit, leaving behind a ghost blog (which is pretty much what happened w/the vast majority of homepages).

Happily, if unintentionally, I think the existing leading bloggers (those at the high end of the power-law curve) will play a key role in educating the new wave of bloggers by providing living examples of how blogs can be a part of a person's personal life, their vocations, and their avocations.  Like in other media, these role models will become aspirational figures to the average consumer blogger, showing the novice blogger the potential of blogs and implicitly inviting them to emulate the role model.  Sort of an informal celebrity endorsement.

So what else do we need to do to make sure that blogs can continue to enrich the world and not simply waste bandwidth? 

Why do people blog?  Is it for fame or fortune?  I think it must be principally for fame since most people realize they will never realistically ever make any significant amount of money off of their blog (not unless they were famous). 

Fame is a very powerful motivator.  Our culture worships fame and there is probably a strong evolutionary biological component to the desire- and need- for fame in social groups.  Fame = social capital = social influence/power = security and control over resources like people's attention.  Fame, in many ways, defines leaders and provides a sense of social order which is necessary for social animals like us.  Heady stuff. 

Some people may object and say they create their blogs for purely personal, introspective reasons.  In some cases, I am sure they are correct, but I think most bloggers are extroverts and want the notoriety a blog can bring.  For the extroverts, if no one ever reads their blog, or comments on it, I think most will give up blogging.  They will have lost their sustaining motivation. 

This is potentially a big problem for entrepreneurs who hope to profit from the coming early majority blogger adoption boom. 

As millions more bloggers come online, the challenge of garnering significant amounts of people's attention (which converts to social capital and, therefore, personal fame) is going to grow exponentially more difficult.  Fame, as measured by services like Google, Popdex, Technorati, etc, is going to grow very far out of reach for nearly all bloggers.  This will be very frustrating for many people unless expectations get reset. 

So the question becomes, how does blogosphere success get redefined to make sure blogs become a permanent part of the mainstream and are not some digital equivalent of an algae bloom where the population explodes, chokes off the resources it needs to survive, and then dies. 

For blogs to really change the world, everyone needs one, but the current infrastructure in which success is defined by global rankings is not sustainable for the vast majority in a blog-saturated world. 

For the average blogger, fame-as-success model needs to become pride in publishing on what is effectively the new refrigerator door.  It needs to move away from being stack-ranked against bOING bOING and become much, much more socially localized.  We need to encourage the concept of micro-fame among one's peers, friends, and families.  This is both a technical infrastructure change and a social redefinition. 

I am not sure how to best do that but I think that if we look at things like photography, we can see how it evolved from a very specialized and insular community of Photographers into a mass-market of snap-shot takers.  Will blogs do to publishing fame what the Kodak Moment did to photography?

I don't know.  Perhaps they already have.

As is often the case, Jeff Jarvis is a source (or at least a pointer to) great nuggets of information and ideas.  In this case, it happens to be on an interesting article by Rick Bruner of iMedia Connection focused on blogosphere traffic.  Definitely worth a read.