Kent Newsome wrote yesterday about the hardships of blogging. I've seen many blog posts about this in the past, after all what do bloggers know better than their own medium? But where Rubel's post struck a chord was in this section:

"Some of your readers will become your friends. This part of blogging is really a cross-blog social networking thing that is, as I have said before, the natural evolution of the internet message board. We trade ideas, comment on each other's post and generally carry on a conversation.

That's a wonderful thing and it's one of the main reasons I keep doing this.

But the other 98% of your readers don't know you from Adam's housecat. To them you are just a name in an RSS reader with a post or two to be scanned. They won't keep reading because they like you. To the contrary, they may stop by once or twice, but if they don't affirmatively like what they see, they'll move on."

More than that however is his point that he considers some people in his blog-neighborhood as "friends." I'm assuming here that he means friends in a non-blog sort of way; if blogging were to stop, these relationships would continue. If this is the case, what is happening is that bloggers' social networks are beginning to mirror their blog-network. Network structures are flowing from type 2 to type1. Previously, I had associated the three network structures I outlined with the three main sections of the power-law continuum of the "long tail." (The long-tailers as type 1, the magic-middle/big-butt as type 2, and the A-listers as type 3.) That the middle-residents are becoming more like the long-tailers implies an aging social network. Perhaps the type 2 structure, and hence the structure of the middle of the power-law curve in blogging, is an unstable state. Blogs in the middle will either tend upward in the curve, becoming more like broadcast entities, or, after remaining in the middle for a while, come to resemble the network structure of the long-tail, where one's social network is increasingly reflected in the blog-network.

Perhaps, then, the predictions that the middle-blogs are the future of blogging are off. With increasingly insular and closed networks (as type 1 networks are) the myth of a unified "blogosphere" becomes even further from the truth. We need to start focusing on the long-tailers as the meat of blog-networks. How can they operate in a socially beneficial manner? Are bloggers doomed to always be preaching to their choir as their choir preaches right back?