Mainstream Bloggers vs Random Sampling
Reading blogs via the Long Tail is an interesting contrast to the usual blogs I read.
The sheer mindlessness of most posts aside, the what I’m used to reading is mostly people linking to interesting things and then commenting on them. They’re aggregators. Scoble, for example, or Scripting News.
The reason the aggregator bloggers are so popular is that you’re more likely to find something interesting there. They’ve pre-filtered the news for you, so as long as you find their output interesting, it’s a great place to look. But it’s also a drawback that they’ve pre-filtered the news for you.
Reading random posts from the Long Tail, almost none of them are comments on or links to other sites. They’re real people saying things.
The challenge, now, is to come up with an automatic way of filtering this content down to content that’s interesting to you, without filtering out anything relevant.