I’m not so sure. Fred Wilson posted yesterday about a looming attention crisis. He makes a few good points about how attention is a zero sum game. Sure, we can try to increase the capacity of information a person can absorb, but an individual has a limit. He says
Most of us have day jobs. Many of us have families. So we have a limited amount of attention left. And I suspect we are consuming most of it with what we’ve got on our plates today.
So where does the attention come for the next wave of blogs and web services? From the old ones, I guess. In my case, its not going to come out of my family’s attention allocation or my firm’s.
Fred points out that while there are so many interesting blogs and web services to check out, its just not possible to concentrate on all of them.
Still, I don’t think there is an attention crisis coming. Sites like memeorandum are what will make our lives easier. Its like watching Headline News on CNN. Its a quick view of the important topics in the blogosphere. If a person wants to know more about a topic, they can go search for it.
In a way, blogs and web 2.0 is going through what cable tv went through. When everyone realized that there could five bazillion cable channels, one for every little interest, it could have become overwhelming. But nothing like that has happened. There is only one channel about food, a few sports channels like ESPN and the regional Fox sport channels, and a few music channels. Why aren’t there shows on Indian or Chinese cooking? Because there isn’t a big enough market to devote an entire channel to them. There are so many blogs and sites because there is a low barrier of entry. While the informative blogs may hang around, most of the web 2.0 services are going to disappear or get merged into big portals like Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Google.
I think Fred is describing a situation similar to when I got my Tivo. At first, I simply recorded the shows that I wanted to watch but never could because of overlapping time slots. After a while, I kept getting season passes for shows that I wanted to watch but never had time for. My Tivo was regularly maxed out. My solution? I took most of the shows and just rented them when they came out on DVD. As most users do when they first discover blogs, they add tons of feeds to their readers, but eventually pare them down.
Its harder for Fred being a VC who has to evaluate the technologies, but I don’t think it will be an issue for most mainstream users.