I was talking yesterday with Phil Windley about what we both perceive to be a drop-off of traffic from other blogs as compared to a few years ago. Phil’s thought — and I agree — is that the blogosphere has evolved to become a more real-time world. Twitter, TwitterGram, Facebook’s status updates and similar short-format micro-blogs along with TechMeme, TechCrunch, Valleyway and (of course) Scoble have shifted the emphasis of blogging towards immediate and time-sensitive content. While there was always the concept of a scoop in the blogosphere, it’s now measured in minutes rather than days. I don’t know about you, and I’m not judging it as better or worse, but I find that much of what I read in RSS is now very current and transitory.
This begs the question: What *is* the best way to learn about long shelf-life content such as the programs we produce on The Conversations Network? Most of our traffic used to come in via links from bloggers, but those folks are now focused on more immediate short-term interests. RSS and blogs used to be a major recommendation engine for us, but that’s falling off. We’re trying to understand what’s changed in the online world and what are the best recommendation systems and methods for long-format less immediate content.