Blogs: Deepcasting And Shallowcasting
Bloggers want to do deeper and wider, revealing more to broader audiences in more meaningful exchanges. Could changes in technology be making that easier?
Recently, I mentioned the idea of shallowcasting, which has came up as I was thinking about blogs to add to my links. I’m not trying to create a string of “how-to-blog” rules, but I do notice I prefer blogs that are not just content-rich, but also link-rich (and even conversation rich). To me this adds a degree of depth to the experience of the blog. By contrast, I don’t like to link blogs that have no comments or few links because they tend to provide little by way of discourse context; they feel conversationally shallow to me (despite how good their main content may be).
So I have been toying with the terms, shallocasting and deepcasting, to explain this issue. It is already pretty obvious that the existing media terms, broadcast and narrowcast can be applied to blogs. In fact it seems clear to me that the blogsophere is simultaneously becoming a broadcast network for some and nothing more than a narrowcast network for others. My hope is that shallowcast and deepcast will be two ideas that help us think a little more about the way the structure of the blog shapes the experience of the blog.
Saying a blog is shallowcast does not mean it has poor content (some shallocast blogs have fantastic writing). Rather, it is a call on the experience and relationality of the blog. A shallowcast blog has a narrow focus, it draws you in specifically to its content, but in some ways is like a room with only one or two doors (even if it has a great view out the window).
By contrast, a deepcast blog has many doors, and possibly many ways of enjoying the view. It draws you not just to content, but into conversation. This may be because of extensive comments, or because of a wealth of links, or because of breadth of secondary information (which in a blog usually appears via the sidebar).
Deepcasting is no guarantee of either the quality or popularity of a blog. There are some massively sucessful shallowcast blogs and some woderfully designed, rich, yet obscure shallowcast blogs. However, I think the question of whether to aim to be a shallowcast, or deepcast blog is one that sometimes reveals a great deal about the appoach a blogger takes to their work (and to the rest of the blogosphere).
Without doubt xfn, or relational netwroking promises to be a big tool in expanding deepcasting. I look forward to implementing it in due course.
NOTE: Of course this didn’t evolve this way at all, because social media came along, and was an easier way for most people to find depth and width in their online communications.
