Thrillseeking and the Challenge of Creating Content

A few months ago, Vivian and I went to a family run Chinese restaurant we use to visit nearly weekly around the turn of the century.   The woman said, as she seated us, "We hardly see you two any more."  It was very much like a mother to a son who has been away at college.  Sad and abandoned.

And we felt bad.

So I was pondering why we didn't get to Hing Loon as much as we used to.  The people are still wonderful, the food is very good, and there's plenty of things to order there we can't find anywhere else in Seattle (or at least not done right).

So I mentioned to Vivian that perhaps Foodies were thrillseekers.  And there were so many new restaurants to try, it's almost impossible to be both a Foodie and a regular.

Today, my blogfriend Jason at Webomatica said something in a similar vein about Battlestar Galactica. He says:

This is another episode where I liked many developments, while others felt lacking. I think the bar is raised so high, it’s hard for me to feel satisfied any time an episode is less than awesome.

I had to stop reading there because I do intend to get the DVDs and actually watch everything past the Season 2.0 - which is when I stopped watching.

There has been a rapid increase in quality and quantity of a lot of things lately - restaurants (at least in Seattle), television dramas, software, video games, blogs, etc.  And that's been wonderful.  I've been excitedly going to various restaurants, trying new things, and coming home to try and re-create them in my kitchen or on the grill.

And I've been pondering Hing Loon.  They always had the quality.  They always made me feel welcome.  Yet, they've suffered due to the massive influx of restaurants in Seattle.

It strikes me that this is an issue faced by all content providers today.  Take a look at my blogroll in the right column of this blog.  I have a lot of blogs I follow, but I follow them like "Today I think I shall read Jerry Michalski" and then I read what he's written over the last two weeks or so.  I'm lousy at reading them as they come.

In my blogroll are a lot of people I care about, but there's so much content being generated that I can't possibly read it all as it happens.

This isn't just true for me.  I have over 200 subscribers to my blog, but only about 100 people actually visit the blog site every day and about 60% of those are search traffic.   I know that people save up my posts and then read a bunch at a time.  And my posts are so long that I know most only skim.

But there's always something new.  There's always something else to grab your attention.  And, as Jason notes, with the sheer volume and general increase in quality, it's easy to dismiss something really good because it isn't "awesome".

Ed Vielmetti and I have discussed blog posts that get repeat visits long after posting and ones that get tons of immediate attention.  My Twitter post this week received a lot of attention, but it was all SXSW hype.  In a week it will be forgotten.  However, my post on various Torrent search engines gets regular attention.

I wonder if Hing Loon is like my Torrent post.  Actual value, good quality, and meeting a long standing need.  While my Twitter post is like some of these new delicious yet overproduced restaurants that will tantalize me this week and bore me next week.

Photo: Excellent Hing Loon by Ario

Technorati tags: webomatica, torrent, web 2.0, content, hing loon, twitter, jerry Michalski, ed Vielmetti

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

There's something difficult in figuring out where you want to be a regular, and where you want to show up every once in a long while to see what's new. There are some cafes where I used to show up with Saul in tow every single Sunday, and now four years later I'm hardly ever there and not with him (though my postcard is still up on the wall).

I've been using the Adwords keyword tool at

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

to help think about related terms for traffic. If you look at the comparison between "twitter" and "torrent" in that tool it should be pretty clear what's going on - there's a huge field of related terms around torrent, but the related terms around twitter are much less related.

I don't know how long the net will stay twitterpated.

[Webomatica]

Thanks for Thinking Different and observing things in a unique light.

I hear you about the search for quality among the deluge of information. I finally got all 50 something RSS feeds loaded into Google Reader after my hard drive crash and - it's overwhelming.

I think even as the deluge of information gets larger and larger, there's still a finite amount of attention one person can give. So although we have so many more options in terms of info sources, inevitably the brain is going to step in and come up with filters like "quality" - maybe if only as a defense mechanism!

[ario]

great post, thanks for using my photo!