As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, I was once again struck by the increas­ing num­ber of famil­iar head­lines. By this I don’t mean sim­ilar themes con­tinue to be explored (although true — Hil­ary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kit­tens into wells), but rather that I had already read the art­icles that were pop­ping as new posts. My imme­di­ate thought was that Reader wasn’t catch­ing my ‘mark as read’ flags, or that I had inad­vert­ently cre­ated duplic­ate feeds. Alas, neither the case. These are the same posts…simply with dif­fer­ent author­ship claimed. Note that I am not even get­ting into the auto­mated blog post pir­acy that is designed only to attract search engine attention.

When you try to stay on top of all your news feeds with a reader and attempt to stra­tegic­ally man­age the mul­ti­tude of feeds, the col­lapsing of feeds into head­lines makes this phe­nomenon rather obvi­ous. As I con­sidered this, I real­ized that there is a cer­tain tier­ing in the blog­go­sphere. Digg, Redit and other aggreg­at­ors are at the low­est level and expli­citly point to other’s posts. At the ‘highest’ level you have blogs that cre­ate abso­lutely ori­ginal, thought­ful and unique posts. Between these there are all man­ners of vari­ants. Review sites are some­where in this milieu and they account for a sub­stan­tial amount of this over­lap. Some new gad­get is released and the sites all tend to either hear about it or get their hands on it around the same time. Yet, it is inter­est­ing to note (when you have far too many RSS feeds com­ing in) post grav­ity and proliferation.

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