Ezra Klein: Social Media is Threatening to Kill the Conversational Web

In his post “What Andrew Sullivan’s exit says about the future of blogging,” 
back in January, Ezra Klein has this interesting analysis of what is happening to blogging:

… at this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.
Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own.

What Ezra says here makes me ponder how I deal with this issue. First, I think that conversation among bloggers is alive and well on Twitter. Second, for me, Quartz columns that each need to stand on their own are balanced out by blog posts that presume readers who are likely to have read more previous posts. 

The place I feel I fall down is in not finding time to read all the other economics and non-economics blogs out there that I would like to. There are many, many conversations I would love to have, but don’t for lack of time.