Quantity: Dave Sifry posts a semi-annual update on macro blogging economy as tracked by Technorati. One chart shows the number of blogs doubling every 5 months. This number includes a growing number of spam and fake blogs, but also likely misses many internal business blogs and blog-like publishing in places like Omidyar.net. Clearly, the conversation that is the blogosphere still growing fast. via Dave Pollard
Quality: Britt Blaser, via Euan, suggesting camp fire talk as an organizing aesthetic for corporate blogging:
Around the fire, after a day of grubbing for grubs or dancing between the legs of a woolly mammoth, our ancestors didn’t harangue cavemates about how their new improved spear thrower would jump-start their sex life. You can’t fool anyone around the fire, because you’ve all been doing the same thing all day, your frailties and strengths on display… During most of our history, there hasn’t been much conversation except camp fire talk… We all know what it is and, better, what it isn’t. Blogging is forcing us to remember how to do Camp Fire Talk.
The other guide that comes to mind is travel talk, the kind of information exchange that takes place on street corners, in train compartments, in hostels, at trailheads. Meeting places, chance encounters, open markets, recent past trading for possible futures.
What a great analogy: The less we have to endure natural mounds of animal droppings, the more we create our own. Can we call this the Elasticity Curve of Bullshit?
hey mark, where are you anyway? find a lot of places you’ve *been* listed in your bio, but not the place you *are.*
here’s that economist in you… coming straight from that economics posting i see you just made and now finding elasticity curves everywhere!
Those curves are everywhere, man the barricades!
I’m in Richmond, VA, Mike. City of the Monuments and $50 used-iBook stampedes.
rats. your graphic made me think nyc, where i’m flying on wednesday.
thinking more about the elasticity of bullshit… would that be measuring the rate at which an increase in bullshit causes and increase in turnover? at what rate, as the cost of it goes up, do we just stop buying it?