Suddenly, there’s a raft of blog posts pointing out changes in the blogosphere caused by its dumb lovechild, social networking. Some bloggers are even heading for the exit. Here’s a quick roundup :

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void make this interesting point about thought leadership, one of the traditional drivers of the tertiary blogosphere : “Suddenly, social networks start being successfully created without the ‘A-Listers’ having to act like ‘Hubs’ [or 'Human Social Objects', if you want to get REALLY technical]. Suddenly, the need for A-listers to arbitrate ‘Who the Cool Kids are’ [and who they aren't] is rapidly and thankfully diminished.!”

Robert Scoble has a go too : “One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.”

So traffic is moving from relatively coherent writerly patterns to the kind of bullet point messages we used to send in telegrams.

Rex Hammock highlights the dumb-down effect of social networking : “When you set up a Facebook account, you’re not weighted down with the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit or whatever it is that keeps most people from setting up a blog.”

Goddam those writers, publishers and pundits! What do they know? Let’s all babble together!

David Jaffe, a games designer and blogger sighs : “I’m going to go dark. … For me, it’s always been silly, stupid fun…you know, giving what I get, talking like alot of folks on geeky message boards do, trash talking, etc.”

Is this a trend? Well, I’ve been writing this stuff for ages here on Syntagma — which ceased being a blog yonks since.

The catalyst for all this angst, of course, is the unstoppable rush to social networks, like Twitter, Facebook and now Pownce. Geeks genuinely feel they have to keep up with this trend or they’ll be left stranded behind the curve. Kids just have to do it or get confined to social outer darkness. All this crosses over the endless debates about “new media” (I prefer “popular media”) and the mainstream media, the future of newsprint … etcetera.

Personally, I’ve always thought that the medium matters less than we suppose, assuming it doesn’t carry some self-limiting factor, like 140-character max output range, in which case it’s unfit for most purposes.

For example, some newspapers incorporate an occasional poetry spot, where decent poets can publish their verses. Does that make the poet a journalist? If writers use blog platforms to publish the kind of article that could easily appear in a broadsheet paper or specialist magazine, does that make them bloggers?

The medium isn’t the message, the quality and form of the writing, or broadcasting is. Good reportage is just that, wherever it appears. So is commentary. So is any other form of expression. We’ve been confusing the medium with the message for too long — since Marshall Mcluhan in fact.

Nowadays, shopping lists, quick notes, annotations, reminders, and so on are rapidly becoming the discourse of choice in the online world. Even A-Listers are getting dragged into it. Coherence is losing out to the babble of Babel. Quality to quantity.

Rex Hammock talks of “the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit …” Naturally, this isn’t for everyone. The idea that everyone has a novel in them, or could be a published author, was never a runner. In any originative profession, only 5 percent of aspiring entrants ever truly succeed. Some bloggers use their blogs as their identity, promoting consultancy work or their offline writing.

What particularly interests me is online content production. We shouldn’t confuse this with instant messaging, which is what the social networks are doing. You don’t IM an op-ed on world economic prospects.

Content production is done for two reasons :

1. As hobby, amateur production, fun.
2. As a professional activity aimed at financial returns.

People often start out as #1 practitioners then, if they think they’re good enough, they might move on to #2.

That’s where most of the people engaged in this debate are. They are pros in an increasingly amateurish media space. That’s why there are now dozens of books getting into print, like The 4-Hour Workweek and Andrew Keen’s tirade against the negative effects of popular media, The Cult of the Amateur.

The way to survive all this hype and arm-twisting is The Low Information Diet, severely limiting your consumption of news and gibberish, and concentrating ferociously on what matters to you. If it’s income you’re after, productivity and targeting are the keynotes of performance.

It’s true, though, that most of us like to sound off about this and that — join the “conversation”, as it’s called. But the conversation is largely spurious unless you’re doing it for genuine economic or social reasons, in which latter case you’d be better off in the real world.

If you’re an originative intellectual worker on the internet, discipline and focus are the watchwords. Anything else is professional suicide.

I’ve been pondering on this for over a week now as it ties in with much of what I’ve been writing and thinking about for many years.

The low information diet is a neat phrase — and concept — used in Timothy Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago. It also sings from the same hymn sheet as another book, Mediated — How the Media Shape Your World, which I also reviewed here some months since.

Information is the bane of our lives. It pursues us everywhere, via billboards and Blackberrys, cell phones and laptops. Information never stops, it seeps into our brains, jams out all useful activity and crashes any tendency to creativity. Most of it is useless, irrelevant, biassed, deceitful, deceptive and damaging to our health.

Do I like information? I love it. We all do. But, like alcohol and drugs, it’s monumentally counter-productive unless consumed in tiny doses at precisely the right time.

The problem is, information makes us feel important, connected, in league with “where it’s at”. If we don’t get any, we’re sure to look inadequate at the XYZ Conference. We never stop to think that the XYZ Conference is just another vehicle for more useless information, as is that so-vital podcast, video hookup or blog post (present post excepted because of its essential nature).

Ferriss’s chapter with the same title as this post is the best eight-page sequence in his book. Alone it will change your life. If you’re a Techmeme groupie or a news junkie — as I used to be — read it and learn about “selective ignorance” and the trial one-week media fast.

Refuse to be mediated, concentrate on that personal task in hand. Only your work and activity is worthy of your attention. Everything else may be relevant to others, but will kill your effectiveness and utility if you indulge in it.

There are many traps to watch out for too. I watched Ferriss being interviewed on the Scoble Show the other day hoping to discover whether the author’s wildly romantic CV had any truth in it and whether he did indeed work only four hours a week. Most of it was driven by Scoble’s interventions pushing some aspect of his own work methods. Unfortunately, it diverted the author onto narrow detail-driven paths that made his ideas seem trite. Like hiring someone in India to triage his email. Now I do know about hiring people to do simple tasks, like writing content, and believe me the time-overhead involved is usually much greater than doing the job yourself — especially if it’s triaging your email.

Outsourcing is rarely the answer because of the admin and the need to train the outsourcee. They will also require supervision to keep them up to standard, billing and paying, accounting and complimenting. It really is not as simple as Ferriss says.

So let’s stick with the low information diet. This is the nub of the matter. Get it right — depending on the source of your income stream — and all else follows.

Draw up a few relevancy charts. Redraw them onto one page and into one box. Eliminate anything even slightly superfluous. Concentrate ferociously on what’s left, but only to the extent that it serves your purpose, and you are beginning to see the light.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. William of Occam.

Take Occam’s Razor to everything you do and you won’t go far wrong. Not to do so is to cut your own throat.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. Albert Einstein.

Update : Catch Timothy Ferriss on The Scoble Show.

Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek is one of those business books that use counter-intuition as a badge of merit. Much of it is so batty and over-egged you wonder if you’re not wasting your time reading it.

And yet the core message is a powerful one, and it contains much food for thought for anyone stuck in a boring career, or running an ailing business.

The subtitle is, “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”.

New rich, or NR, is an important refrain throughout the book. And yes, acronyms abound. DEAL — D for Definition, E for Elimination, A for Automation, L for Liberation, makes for tiresome reading sometimes, as does the author’s CV.

Did author Timothy Ferriss really become national kickboxing champion of China by using a loophole in the rules allowing him to push his opponents out of the ring a few times to eliminate them from the competition? And if so, is that the way you want to run your life? Your call.

He also claims to have been a motorcycle racer in Europe, Argentine Tango champ in Buenos Aires, a scuba diver in Panama and a skier in the Andes. Oh, and a language teacher in Thailand and Japan and … much more. Bear in mind he’s only 29, or was when he wrote the book.

Well, maybe so, but these boasts don’t add much to his basic thesis. And thesis it is, for Ferriss is a very smart cookie. His main ideas, like the low-information diet (down with RSS), outsourcing the boring stuff, reducing work to what you do best, have much in common with the 80/20 principle, but go that extra mile to the very limits of absurdity. The brakes screech on at the last moment, though, and he avoids complete overturn — just. Maybe that’s his motor-racing experience coming through.

The book is also interestingly interactive. We’re referred to his website for the latest, or most detailed information. It’s a good way to drive traffic as those of us who advocate print/online synergy have been saying for a while. Be aware, he also embeds passwords in the text for the most intriguing documents online. This is a total tease, but one way of making sure you read the whole book.

By now you will have realized that Timothy Ferriss is a bit of a flamboyant sort of chap. While that may be the new blue in business book style, the main question for this reviewer is : does it contain enough meaty nuggets of new ideas and information to justify trawling through the whole book with umpteen visits to the website?

I would say, yes. It certainly made me rethink many of my lazy, received-wisdom notions about business … and even life. Wow, I didn’t think I was going to write the L word there. That’s what Ferriss does, he gets you branching out laterally in ways you never intended.

Whether any of his schemes will stick enough to actually change anything remains to be seen. I also have to say, that some of them appear to be marginally illegal, at least where I am. So, if you can’t afford a lawyer … well, I’m not one either, so I’m not going to advise you.

Judgement : I would emphatically recommend this book if you have a taste for the extraordinary and don’t mind flouting conventions and doing things “your way”. Of course, if you do ‘em his way, you may find yourself perched on a giant Ferris wheel unable to get off. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.