ON YAHOO!/DEL.ICIO.US NEWS OVER-COVERED BY TECH/MEDIA BLOGS?

ALL TOGETHER NOW

Seeing the Yahoo!/Del.icio.us acquisition story re-surface at the top of Memeorandum again today two days after the fact, made me think of Brad Feld's thoughtful post from yesterday.  He eloquently put in words thoughts that had gone through my head as well:

"I just finished going through everything and was stunned by the amount of discussion about the Yahoo / del.icio.us deal. I’m very excited and happy for everyone involved, but as I read through post after post after post saying “Yahoo bought del.ciou.us” I started to feel something was wrong. 

I checked on Technorati – “delicious” is the number one search this hour (and Yahoo is four; Delicious Yahoo is six).  I checked NewsGator’s Latest Buzz – the first is Joshua’s post and the second is Jeremy Zawodny / Yahoo’s post...

...there is a huge content imbalance when everyone is writing about the same thing.  There was a very large and interesting deal done on Monday last week that arguably has much greater importance to the structure of the tech / media business than Yahoo / del.icio.us and it had extremely little coverage by the tech bloggers.  Can you name that deal? Liberty Media acquired Provide Commerce for $477 million (PRVD was public – $33.30 / share – 50% valuation increase in the past 60 days). "

He goes on to respond to a detailed rebuttal by Jason Wood in the comment section:

"My biggest concern was that the RATIO of discussion was out of balance. Let's be generous and say I had saw one post about the L / PRVD deal. That's 1:200. That doesn't make sense to me.

Or - let's use Technorati. A search on "liberty" and "media" and "provide" and "commerce" and "liberty media" shows 45 posts in the past 4 days. A search on "Yahoo" and "del.icio.us" is 7200 posts. That's 1:160."

He's right...I'm guilty of it as well, having had two posts on the Yahoo!/Del.icio.us deal, although making hopefully two different, relevant points.  I did spend some time researching the L/PRVD deal, but did not blog about it at all.  Certainly the fact that Yahoo!/Del.icio.us are more familiar, accessible and damn it, more sexy to readers, probably had a role to play in it. 

Does this mean we bloggers are getting unfair and unbalanced, just like mainstream media?

I'm not sure what the answer to this imbalance is, whether it's on terrific services like memeorandum or the broader universe of blogs discussing tech and media issues. 

That blogs, on an aggregated basis are taking on the almost claustrophobic myopia of mainstream media, is something that I guess shouldn't surprise us.  Let's just hope it's more the exception than the rule as it is with TV news in particular.

At the very least, it's probably a manifestation of an eternal aspect of human nature, behaving the same way with microchunked media as it has with mainstream, general media.  We like the stuff that sizzles.

But I do think it's important to be at least AWARE of this imbalance, particularly as the mainstream media and users are paying greater attention to these new services.

For highlighting the issue alone, I'd rate Brad's post one of the best blog reads of the week.

Comments

[Zoli Erdos]

This reminds me of another imbalance: the eBay/Skype deal completely overshadowed to Oracle/Siebel one, both announced the same day.

Anyway, I have a PC and an honest/cynical theory on the "imbalance".

PC: We all add some value to the discussion by bringing our own points of view. For me the "extra" was a comparison of Yahoo vs. Google, with Yahoo catching up/passing Google in certain areas and becoming "cool" again.

Honest: We all love getting extra Technorati/Google juice...it appears to be mandatory for the top bloggers to mention events like this, even though already well covered, whether they add valu or not.. even if just referencing other posts. A not-so-meaningful post on a well-blogged popular subject with a bunch of links yields more Technorati-boost then a well though out long article presenting original content.
:-)

[Michael Parekh]

Well said, Zoli...thanks.

[Jason Wood]

Michael,

Many thanks for the mention. I've grown increasingly frustrated with tech.meme through no fault of their own per se, but exactly because of what Brad griped about in his initial post...meme seems to reference adjunct articles and is very incestuous in that regard. Ultimately blogging [for me at least] is about discovering new and intriguing voices that are talking about issues I care about...meme hits on the 2nd part [issues I care about], but I'm not convinced they do the first part [discover new and intriguing voices] all that well.

[Mathew Ingram]

I'd have to agree with Jason -- there is a bit of an insular (or incestuous) quality to memeorandum's links sometimes, and what I value is finding the alternative voice. But at the same time, I would argue that memeorandum does a pretty good job of finding and linking to those to -- and that's where I would take issue with Brad's comments. Just because everyone is writing about Yahoo and del.icio.us or about Skype and eBay doesn't mean that they are all saying the same thing about those topics, and often the discussion about a deal like those ones helps to stimulate ideas about other things. So I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing.

[Paul Montgomery]

Memeorandum is based on a whitelist, so by definition it is going to be cliquey. It doesn't crawl the whole blogosphere looking for the new alternative views. Gabe does a good job updating that whitelist in real time, though.

[Gabe]

Paul, the software finds new sources on its own. I do update a training set from time to time, but the list currently monitored always far exceeds what I've specified.