I heard Jon Udell at Syndicate yesterday, talking about unsubscribing from many feeds, and relying on the social network of those that were left to keep him up to date on what's really important out there. I am (no surprise) doing the same thing -- down to a few dozen critical feeds.

Steve Gillmor wrote about this, and coined the term Syndisphere to denote this principle:

[from Vote with your feed]

This is the subscription economy we're talking about. Not the Blogosphere so much as the Syndisphere. In this ecosystem, the contract is based on continued attention, not captured attention. It leverages a form of broadcast couch potato dynamics, where inertia keeps you tuned from ER to Leno to Today. When CSI broke that cycle, it was a big deal. In the Syndisphere once you've signed on, it takes more effort than it's worth to sign off. Unsubscribing requires real motivation.

[...]

Jon's [Udell] choice is to withdraw the feed tube on a blogger-by-blogger basis. Bloglines and de.licio.us have helped cull the wheat from most chaff feeds, so Jon is willing to forego the main feed and wait the additional few minutes it takes for other filters to bubble up the occasional gem to the surface. But multiply this effect by thousands, as Bloglines reports indirectly via its public subscription data, and a power law begins to emerge. When thought leaders like Udell stop subscribing, thought readers follow suit.

Steve goes on, in a really chock-full-of-nuts piece, to suggest that

1. Feeds are the nose-under-the-tent of the attention model replacing the page view model: "adveritising will only work if it is perceived as information".
   
2. It's early days for capitalizing on the buyout fever that is developing in this space -- apropos of the comments I made earlier this week about Technorati being an obvious target for Google, Yahoo, etc.
   
3. On podcasting -- "I've been constrained by NDA and negotiations from discussing podcasting" -- hmm. Something's being cooked up, obviously. He goes on to say that the Syndisphere is the new mainstream media. Well, considering the smell of fear at Syndicate, we are definitely the boogeyman under the bed at the very least.
   
4. He ends with a question: "In the Syndisphere, is the link the fundamental coin of the realm. If not, what is?" The weighted link (the hyperlink plus the identity and reputation of its creator) is the measure of value in the blogosphere.

[tags: Syndicate, IDG Syndicate, Jon Udell, Steve Gillmor, Technorati, social+media]