I’ve been feeling overwhelmed recently. It seems that every time I sit down to write a real post, I find that it’s already been written. I started this blog as a place for me to clarify my own opinions, but when I start the laborious process of synthesizing all that I’ve read on a subject, I realize that I’m merely summarizing. Someone has said it better, or at least as well. So why should repeat their wok?
For instance, I had been working on a post discussing the abundance of options in our culture, and the paralysis they often cause. I had a ton of cases laid out, with a structure and everything. As it so happened, while searching for a completely different article, I found that Joel had already written about this exact problem. He took a slightly different angle than I had planned, but he made the same points as I would have, only better. And two years ago.1
So I scrapped that idea and moved onto my next essay, which would focus on my generation as I had observed it while in college and, subsequently, now that we’re in the real world. On the bus on my way to work, I was reading the Economist, which I often do, and what do you know? They’ve written a solid and concise article which discusses the very thing I want to focus on. Seems silly to reiterate their points to my readers, who probably all read the article anyway.
One part of my essay on generation Y, or whatever you want to call us, would have focused on the twitter phenomenon, and how we had all experienced it 10 years ago in the form of AOL away messages. The best way to attract a girl, make fun of a friend, or establish your taste in music was always the away message. Before I could write that up, I read A VC’s post about status, in which he makes the exact point I intended to make.
In fact, I had an entire post planned for my discussion of Twitter. It is the talk of the town, and I had collected quite the treasure chest of amusing anecdotes. I planned to outline all the popular 3rd party tools and services that have spring up, creating a small Twitter ecosystem. There are a lot of questions about Twitter, and I planned to answer them. I do know the accepted to answers to these questions that no one was asking me, though mostly from reading about them and not actually using the service. In fact, a large part of my post would’ve have been devoted to why Twitter isn’t for me, and how I could say how others might enjoy it.2 Why should I merely pass along the crowds’ collective wisdom to my readers? What could be less personal?
Some of the accepted wisdom says that Twitter and related services will replace traditional print media in the very near future, so I had a post on the future of newspapers as well. That post struck me in particular as absurd; i started writing it several times, and each time I found myself responding to some theory that no one had advanced. Of course the industry is in trouble, and of course everyone knows that. There’s no real position to take on these issues, at least not form my vantage point. I don’t work for the New York Times, or for Twitter, or for the businesses in trouble. I have no data, no idea what has been planned, no clue about what has worked or not worked in the past. I of course would have covered that stuff, basing my thoughts on other peoples’, but I can’t really see a point in that.
Pushing the print media post out of my mind, it occurred to me that I should write about something I care a lot about. I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between law and technology, and I’ve been reading a lot about copyright recently, so I thought I’d devote a post to that topic. One of the more famous authors I’ve been following on the subject, Larry Lessig, came and gave a talk at my job a few weeks ago. I had seen him give the talk in a video posted online, so I allowed my thoughts to wander during his presentation. I loved seeing him in person, and those who have seen him speak can attest to his skills as an orator, most particularly when taking questions from the audience at the end. I also realized that at its absolute best, my post could only hope to accurately summarize his thoughts, since they so closely resemble mine. Again, I found myself merely regurgitating other’s’ thoughts.
I think you get the point, though I have several more examples. I wanted to follow up my post on copyright with a post discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the music industry as opposed to music itself, but then Seth Godin wrote that up. I had a detailed post on the struggle between and merging of web services with native client applications, and related attempts to join the two, like Adobe Air. Interruption marketing and internet advertising were to be my next essay, and I had some pretty funny links for those as well.
Perhaps the most infuriating post, discussing the so-called 80/20 rule in its various incarnations, actually led me to this post. The 80/20 rule is applied across a wide array of fields, and is really a power law distribution as seen in empirical data. While looking up the science, I found Clay Shirky’s 2003 article on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, which not only encompassed my whole discussion, but predicted the very phenomenon I am currently preoccupied with:
Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day, most of the new readers are adding to the traffic of the top few blogs, while most new blogs are getting below average traffic, a gap that will grow as the weblog world does. It’s not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it’s harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year.
Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality – The Median Cannot Hold
So almost exactly 6 years ago, Clay had not only predicted this day, but he also provided a scientific explanation. And now you see why at the start of this post, I told you I have been feeling overwhelmed. Now that I’ve gotten all those posts off my chest, though, I feel better. Tomorrow I will continue the saga of the post-hiatus restructured samstrasser.com.
Notes
1. What’s even worse about that example is that I actually read the article in question two years ago. It seems that while the content sunk in, I managed to forget the source.
2. It seems I joined sometime in 2007, though I can’t find the exact date, and in two years, it hasn’t caught on for me. Maybe I was just too early of an adopter.
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