From memory, there was a long tail of blogs like that way back when, but a core of solid, interesting content. I have an expectation that an aggregator would bubble the interesting stuff up, and the self-referential stuff down. But maybe this is just content the audience finds interesting.
There is still solid and interesting content, it’s just that the material is so diverse that attention is spread thinly. Meanwhile, blogging is the one thing bloggers definitely have in common, so the attention is more concentrated.
It’s a failing of aggregators that they optimize for attention concentration rather than interestingness. But is there even such a thing, objectively?
> attention concentration rather than interestingness
With sufficiently rich data, I think they're equivalent.
I think collaborative filtering works much better once you have a critical mass of users/data - enough that taste clusters emerge. Otherwise it just defaults to whatever's globally popular. Google Reader managed it quite well. Librarything is fantastic at it (far better than Amazon).
I wrote a simple recommendation engine for musical taste in the early 2k's (pre-last.fm), but it had very little data available to it. The result? It recommended Radiohead to everyone. (Looking back, this was my first exposure to The Bitter Lesson).
