Dah, Too Many Essayists in the Blogosphere

by phil on Monday Oct 13, 2003 12:16 PM
blogging, writing

Man, everytime I upgrade my blog-strategy or the type of content I post, I find that there already exists a community of people doing the same thing.

For example, I'm trying to do this thing where I draft articles first, stew on them for a little while, and then I post them. But, now that I start to pay attention to this, I find that there's a world of essayists constantly pumping out analysis on all sorts of topics.

So, what's next? How can I constantly inspire people. I can't keep writing lame essays. They have to be novel, but you can't compete in the space of novelty these days, nothing is novel anymore.

LYD is the key, the idea of a focus, good consistent humor is still hard to find. You have to put things out there that are hard to find. The number of idea-ists out there is amazing, and it's impossible to compete. In economics terms, the supply is huge for simple analysis and therefore it has a low premium.

The idea is consistency, or being "known" for something, recognized as a source. Maybe setting a really high bar for what ideas come out here. Maybe pick only the truly novel analysis.

Yeah, I really do want to inspire, and it's getting harder and harder these days. But wait, what, are you kidding? These essays I see are not inspring or emotionally riling at all. Go to Scripting News, and I am just chewing gum, I don't feel hit with anything but pure data, pure data analysis.

I read something that describes, at the top of maslow's ladder, there is doing meanginful activities, or getting into flow, where you're usually in flow when you're doing what you're best at.

Yeah, to truly compete in the blogosphere, your posts have to be things that only you could post?? that's not exactly true as well, look at LYD, there isn't much talent involved in that, it's funny, it's good, it's consistent, maybe that's his talent, it's not obvious, but it's just being consistent, not glutting the blogwaves with all this other junk, and really farting out gems.

We'll see.

I like challenges.

Weird, you can read this article with the paragraphs in reverse order and it still carries the same impact.

UPDATE: God this related entries engine I'm using is incredible. Here I'm stewing negative about blogging and the engine picked my article, "This Blog Sucks," as being related.