Nicholas Carr Disputes The Threat to Mainstream Media From The Long Tail (CNET, TSCM, TWX)

Nick Carr, ex-executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, argues that far from overturning current media models, blogs will come to resemble “old media”. He writes:

…the blogosphere is going to end up looking a lot like the old “mainstream media.” Rather than being a great democratic free-for-all, the blogosphere will become steadily more rigid and hierarchical. Structurally, it’ll resemble the magazine world. A relatively small number of high-traffic blogs will dominate the market, and then there’ll be a whole lot of more specialized blogs with fewer readers… It won’t be quite as hard for blogs to climb the hierarchy as it is in the print world (simply because the costs of blogging are so much lower), but it won’t be easy, either.

Indeed, the technologies we use to manage our blog reading will reinforce the hierarchy. RSS, for example, imposes the old subscription model on the blogosphere - it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, as it tends to lock us into a set of favorite blogs. (Even though blogs are free, the subscription model imposes real switching costs.) Also, the inevitable (in my view) shift away from blog search engines based on posting date… to ones that use measures of “relevance” based on traffic or link intensity… will also make the hierarchy more rigid and less democratic - as will third-party headline aggregators like Memeorandum, which also tend to reflect and reinforce established patterns of popularity.