MULTIPLE ECOSYSTEMS
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James Joyner | Friday, November 28, 2003 |
N Z Bear has an interesting idea:
I’ve been thinking about the next phase of where I’d like to take the Ecosystem, and have concluded that it may be time to invite other folks to join the party.Here’s the vision: I’d like to see other Ecosystems created, each focusing on their own particular community within the weblog world. Perhaps there could be an Ecosystem for U.S. military bloggers; an Ecosystem for political conservatives (or liberals); an Ecosystem for bloggers writing in Portuguese. Wherever a community of interest exits in the Blogosphere, there might be an Ecosystem for it.
Some might argue that this would contribute to a fragmenting effect in the Blogosphere; isolating communities so that they only communicate internally among themselves. But I think the effect would be the opposite. By providing a focus and nexus for blog communities, I think such Ecosystems would make it easier for outsiders to understand them and sample the work of their bloggers. I know that I’d personally be more likely to genuinely spend time browsing through the blogs of the kinds of communities I note above if there was an easier way to find the most well-regarded bloggers working within them.
This makes sense to me. As the number of bloggers increase, a single listing for all of them makes little sense.
Plus, the Ecosystem right now compares apples to cucumbers in many cases: blogs owned by established mass media outlets, group blogs, individual blogs, political blogs, tech support sites, etc. Indeed, many of the sites in the Top 50 don’t even qualify as blogs in the mainstream sense of that term. Keeping the “mass” ecosytem so that people can track their overall rise in grand perspective but also see who the rising stars are in the various niche categories would be a welcome step forward.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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