So one of the first things I've been thinking about with this blog is the simple question. Who is my audience going to be?
It's entirely possible that some of my close friends or family will wind up reading it. It's possible, but unlikely that in the future my children, or children of the next generation will discover it. It's possible that at some point, some strangers over the internet will start reading it because of some content I post about something draws their continued interest. All I really know for sure is that I'm going to read it at some point in the future.
Since a future version of myself is the target audience and anyone else is a bonus, there's a few things I know I need to do to tailor the content so I'll want to read it again, I'll start with some basic assumptions or hopes about what a future version of me will be like.
1) I'll have less time in the future, due to increased responsibility and aging in general.
2) I'll presumably be wiser and have a broader range of knowledge.
3) I'll respect any content that required some intelligence and effort to create.
Taking those three things into account, it gives me a guide as to how I should think about and structure the content I create. From that I can give myself a couple of simple guidelines about what an ideal blog post should contain if I'm going to be interested in reading in the future.
- Concise and to the point
- Thoughts and ideas should contain some preliminary research and effort.
- Should cover a range of topics I'm likely to be unfamiliar with
So to ensure this post complies with my newly defined guidelines, I'm going to expand on the point and try and estimate some probability of people in the future reading my blog.
To work out the probability of someone reading my blog, we have to consider the rate of content creation, as well as the current amount of content available. We'll assume the rate of content consumption is fixed.
In 2012, there was 745 movies released [1], with an average length of 90 minutes, that's 46 days.
For TV shows it's a bit trickier something like Star Trek: The Next Generation has 178 episodes of 42 minutes each, which is 124.6 hours of viewing. Or 30 rock has 138 episodes of 23 minutes each which is about 53 hours of viewing. If we say the average length and duration of a comedy series is about 60 hours after it's finished and the average drama show is about 100 hours of viewing, then we just need to put a number on how many of those shows are finishing each year. At a guess, I'd say there's at least 3 comedies and 3 dramas finishing each year on average. So that gives us a minimum of about 19 days.
From TV and Movies alone, there's about 62 days a year. Of course that's not including all TV content, I'm excluding things like reality TV, sports, news. It might be better to look at the number of TV channels and competing shows they have in primetime. But I'll leave that for another day. So at 62 days a year of only new video content, there's some time to catch up on the backlog. By what year is the backlog of TV and Movies going to be so great it can't be overcome in a lifetime? I'll leave that for another day as well.
The point I'm trying to get to, is that there already exists more content than anyone could possibly hope consume in their lifetime, and the rate at which it's being produced will grow as the population increases as well. The result of this is that individual blogs are unlikely to be read by anyone in the future, unless at some point, the rate at which humans can consume content is greatly increased by technology.