The future of blogs, more

I had dinner with Glenn Reynolds tonight, and we discussed the future of blogs.

Glenn is so successful because he understands the idea of blogs as portals. (This is my view, not Glenn’s own self-description.) Blogs that offer too much of the author, and the author alone, are vulnerable to other blogs that cream-skim them, and other blogs, thereby offering the superior product. The question is not who can write the best stuff, but who can collect the best stuff, and comment on it most effectively. Really smart people are not always used to these terms of competition, I might add. The future of blogging lies in the hands of those who recognize the intellectual and literary division of labor.

The greater the number of blogs, the greater the importance of “portal blogs,” such as Glenn’s. In the old days you could read all or most of the good blogs yourself. That is becoming increasingly hard, and thus readers will look more and more to blogs that skim the cream.