The Sandbox Effect

Mark Bernstein responds to Jason Kottke’s recent, popular post about “A Whole New Internet“, where the main question seems to be what will happen now that the dot-com bust has busted itself. Money has come back into the vacuum. What will that do? Both Kottke and Bernstein seem to be cautionary about the future.

Kottke says:

Now that the money is back, the focus will necessarily shift even though, as Janice notes, we’ll be a little wiser about it this time around. There will be less innovation and activity from individuals because they’ll be snapped up by companies to work on their projects for their customers. The information flowing out of companies, even those that are pretty open, will be limited because of competitive and legal concerns. A person who — when she was unemployed 3 years ago — could spend a couple weeks in releasing a neat web app for anyone to use because she wanted to or could say what she wanted on her blog will now be putting all her coding energies into an application that serves a few customers & needs to be cash-flow positive and won’t have the time to post anything to her blog (and can’t say much about what she’s working on anyway unless all her readers want to sign NDAs). (Not saying this is bad…this is just what companies are for. But what’s good for companies, their shareholders, and their customers isn’t necessarily what’s good for environment those companies inhabit. On the other hand, everyone I know has more work than they know what to do with and that’s a good thing too.)

Bernstein adds:

We don’t want a static A-List where ten pioneer bloggers become the next Rupert Murdoch and everyone else is perpetually consigned to LiveJournal; we want variety and novelty and excitement and, yes, we want a blogosphere where you can grow to be Kottke if that’s what you want.

I’ve been pondering exactly what we can do to make sure the tail remains a good place to be, and to make sure that there isn’t a sign at the big end of the tail that reads “Sorry: we’re full.”

One step in the right direction, for those so called “tail end” bloggers, might be the kind of blogging that friendster, and similar sites like Blogger, provide. By offering state-of-the-art html output, quality designs, and syndication, these blogs offer more technological sophistication than the average user would ever have the patience to develop on their own — aside from that, it allows others, who may already have the ablity to build such things on their own, to go beyond those things. (Its easier to build on top of a blogger site than it is with others.) Most importantly, making good blogs readily available to anyone who wants one is very good for the flow of ideas. That flow of ideas is something Kottke dwelt on in his post, mentioning that much of the “new” internet came about as a result of the bust, where suddenly unemployed tech-types had time to play with things rather than requirements to work on them. Now that blogs exist, the easier they are to build, the more they leave room for that very important sandbox effect.

As for sites like LiveJournal and MySpace, there is the potential that these users might be left out, and end up publishing B-list content - content that looks like crap, doesn’t syndicate, and is difficult to navigate and link to, etc. I’ve already noticed that dozens and dozens of my friends have begun using MySpace, for example, to start their own forays into the blogging world, and I’m happy for them! I am also annoyed on their behalf that their blogs aren’t nearly as good as they would have been if they had chosen any number of the other options out there. I think they chose MySpace for its particular brand of social networking, which isn’t slow, like friendster, or empty like Orkut.

• I wonder if social networking is the “B-list” to CMS Blog’s “A-List”?
• Perhaps that relationship will reverse?
• I wonder if the more private aspect of these smaller networks might obstruct the flow of ideas, or at least limit the ideas to those in certain circles.
• I wish I had one single unified interface for interacting with all the blogs, the social networks, and the memes that I try to follow on a daily basis.
• In fact, I wish that all of it would arrive in my inbox everyday, like some sort of user-friendly newspaper.