A million voices in the wilderness singing solo.
Most regular blog readers would agree that without aggregators like Bloglines or Newsgator, sifting through the day’s postings would be exceedingly tiresome, if not impossible. Why manage dozens of bookmarks, and plod through page after page, when a free aggregating service will keep all your favorite sites in one place, allowing for quick scanning of headlines to determine where you’d like to spend more time reading?
It’s like a newsstand stocked with publications that you yourself have syndicated. Different themes can be organized in different folders: here are my political feeds, here are my arts feeds, here are my tech feeds etc. These folders are like your daily magazines. Then there is Technorati, the web’s premier blog indexer, where readers can search over 13 million blogs by tag, keyword and prestige (number of incoming links).
Bloggers, too, have ways of tying each other together. Shout outs, quotes, comments, trackbacks, link lists – all of these serve to interweave, and this is in large part how the blogosphere has grown. Over time, certain blogs come to be associated with one another, and coherent communities emerge.
But what happens when blogs choose to aggregate themselves under a single masthead? What happens when the voices decide to group together in a chorus? Do they then become a newspaper? A magazine? A union? A league? A society? It may not yet have a name, but some blogs have in fact started banding together to form a new kind of hybrid publication that is difficult to define.
Part cocktail party, part basement pamphlet press. It’s looser than a magazine, and more conversational. It is a sort of union, but its dues are purely in the form of a blogger’s personal payload – their insight, their charisma, their dedication to certain issues, their unique voice. They are presided over by an editorial authority, but not one that gets in between the writers’ lines or sets a word limit. These are still very much blogs, and authors retain almost total autonomy. Their only obligation is to keep the good stuff coming. Over the next few days, I’ll be profiling a few of these sites. This is by no means a comprehensive list, so please don’t hesitate to recommend others that in some way fit the bill.
1. TPM Café
2. Gawker Media
3. the litblog co-op