Publishing 2.0 — Bubble 2.0 Is a Bubble in Media: Scott Karp points out what a lot of us already feel. Right now when I go to my RSS reader I see that I have 569 unread posts from blogs and search feeds that I consider my “short list.” My “long list” has another 1312 unread posts. And then there is my Flickr news folder and my Microsoft news folder, etc., etc. All in, according to Newsgator, I’ve got 2,907 unread posts in my reader right now.
Throw in my over 1,000 contacts on Flickr, Flickr’s Explore and interestingness, Flickr groups where I like to post and read up and there’s even more. Not to mention my email, my Skype voicemails (that I’m way behind on), my events at upcoming.org to track, staying on top of Digg’s top stories, checking posts that I’ve left comments on in the past to see if new info has come up with delicious, the podcasts that are building up that I haven’t had time to listen to, of course checking memeorandum frequently, and will someone tell me again why I’m paying DirecTV $129 per month when I haven’t watched anything on it since Six Feet Under. I’d better thank my lucky stars that I don’t subscribe to Netflix or I’d really be burried.
Oh, of course then there are the photos to take and process (I’ve got this obessive anal compulsive thing about “needing” to post 10 shots every single day to flickr) and then of course I have a real life job with a Bloomberg and Dow Jones News Wire to watch and four kids and it’s good to take them out of the house every so often which at least if we visit a science museum or the zoo or something I can still take pictures. Oh wait, and hold on while I check Technorati and IceRocket for a second and look at my Sitemeter account to see what my traffic looks like.
Or as Scott puts it:
“[T]here is now too much media competing for too little attention.
The negative economic consequence is that attention is not being allocated efficiently — it’s becoming increasing difficult for people to figure out which of the infinite number of content choices at their fingertips are most worth their time.
The economics of media — which are the new economics of technology — depend on the efficient allocation of attention.
When the cognitive dissonance of too much media choice becomes too great, individual media behavior, i.e. the allocation of attention, will become chaotic and haphazard. When this happens (and it already has), no one is going to be able to build a profitable business model because the two types of media dollars — advertising and content fees — won’t be able to flow efficiently.
The speculation in media that is being driven by the technology industry and blogging is still based on old media economics — it assumes that each site can gather a sufficiently large slice of the attention pie to finance its existence. But if media attention becomes completely fragmented and chaotic, no one will have sufficient scale or a sufficiently coherent audience to capitalize on their investment in media creation — even if the only real cost is time.”
Amen, brother.
