The Fearless Blogger

Information is a beautiful thing - but what happens when there is too much, too soon? And for too short a time?

I just watched this interesting post by Robert Scoble via ScobleizerTV in which he talks about the “Half Life of an Online Conversation“; that is, the flow of news and information in today’s age of friendfeed, twitter, etc.

The video touches on three key areas:

1. Amount of information we receive in a day
2. Duration information is “visible” on the different sites being used to share it
3. Linkability & searchability (are those words?!) of information in order to go back and find conversations after a period of time.

conversations quickly get submerged

Scoble talks about the length of time a conversation would last in the early days of blogging. With fewer people blogging and different technologies available to write, read, and respond, a blog topic/conversation may last for a week or more. Other bloggers would react, people could comment, there would be something we could go back to later to read.

New services like Twitter & FriendFeed result not only in an overload of information and an increased volume of conversations;  but the length of time that a conversation is “viewable” is extremely short. For example, after a few days, the likelihood of viewing a tweet is very slim.

Scoble also touches on ways to extend this “half life” – ways to keep topics around and searchable.

For those who are heavily engaged in the “blogosphere” and/or thrive on Twitter, FriendFeed, and FaceBook, it’s relevance is likely to be easily apparent.

For those on the periphery, it’s a video still worth watching. My guess is by this time next year, you’ll be using twitter in some way, shape or form (food for a different blog post). Accordingly, the way you will be receiving and responding to information will be impacted as well.

At the very least, it’s interesting to watch Scoble’s FriendFeed demonstration for a visual on how quickly the information flows.

(Scoble also included this video in his recent post “The Twitterzation of a Conversation“)

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

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