Are we getting too big for our niches?
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
by Stuart
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In her post Blogging’s Crossroads, Sarah Lacy contemplates whether blogging can or should continue to strive for size. Do communities and conversations scale? At what point does the cost of the noise outweigh the benefit of the signal?
Taking Jason Calacanis’s recent retirement from blogging as her launching pad, Sarah writes about a kind of mid-life crisis moment for bloggers. So many successful bloggers have proven that they can build an audience, rack up page views, make money — in short, meet all the objective criteria for success in modern publishing. But many of those bloggers are starting to ask, “is it all worth it?”
Perhaps it is time to step back and figure out what’s possible in this new landscape. Can we maintain conversation and community at a large scale without things devolving into chaos? Is beating the CNNs and CNETs at their own mass-market game what we really want, or do we need to go back to the idea of finding our niche?
As a journalist whose outlets reach both large and small audiences, Sarah is uniquely suited to tease out the subtleties of these conundrums. We’re looking forward to having this conversation with her at Gnomedex 8.0.
