I come from a people and place where farming has been part job and part culture for as long as I can remember. Yes, I sold out and moved to the big city, and I am not without a little guilt about that. Particularly since my personal philosophy is more grounded in driving a combine than pushing paper around.

To keep some small grip on my past and my sanity, I read a few farming publications, Farmgate being one of them.

As we have talked about seeding a blog with good content, nurturing the conversations that build on such content, growing an internet presence and harvesting the bounty thereof, I have thought many times that blogging is not unlike farming in the planning and execution stages.

Yesterday, Farmgate post an article entitled Are You Planting for Today, or for the Future?

It makes many good points that apply to blog building just as much as farming. Here are some quotes followed by a discussion of how these concepts might apply to blog building:

If you make the change to more soybean acres, are you doing it ““because that is the thing to do?” ” Are you doing it because energy and production costs have risen for corn? And if you are making the change, are you trying to escape costs, and let revenue fall where it may? Are you looking at the end of the marketing year, as well as the start of the production season?

When we decide what topics we want to cover and how we want to cover them, we have to look beyond the here and now. We have to think about how things will look, and sell, later. Once we’ve written hundreds of posts, what will our blog look like. Will there by discernible theme? Will there be sufficient topic rotation to keep the ideas fresh and useful? Will there be a market for what we write? How many other bloggers are out there growing the very same thing? Can they produce the same crops more easily? Are they closer to the relevant markets, such that their transportation costs are less?

I am a visual person. From back in my sports days to my music days to my lawyering days and my writing days, I like to imagine the outcome of my actions. It’s a cliche I suppose, but it comes naturally to me and I do it all the time. I visualize my blog as rotating fields in the ground that is my part of the blogosphere, with a healthy crop of articles, ideas, conversation and humor. Too much of one makes the ground less fertile. Sometimes when nothing grows in one of the fields I let it lie empty for a while.

The educated folks at several universities in the Cornbelt want you to consider what will likely be complexion of the market, before you make any final and unalterable decisions by putting seed in the ground.

What sounds good in theory may not work all that well when put into practice. Things like breaking news topics, blogospats that disrupt the conversation flow, conferences that demand the attention of attendees and a horde of other weather-like factors affect how well your crops grow. You can’t always predict these things, but you have to plan for them by taking the long view. If you write a good post and it gets lost in the mix because of a big story, it will get discovered later. And even if it doesn’t, you’ve got other crops in other fields.

While planting decisions remain with the producer, those decisions should be made with the help of knowing the potential marketing outcome of the decision, and not just information based on production costs.

As I said in my 10/90 post, how easy or hard something is to write is not an accurate predictor of what will get noticed in the blogosphere. To get sold there needs to be a market. So what if I wrote one lengthy post about mobile technology, others have entire blogs full of more knowledgable and better written posts. You have to take the long view.

You lose some crops and sometimes you have bad spells (like this past weekend, when the blogosphere was a slow as freeze dried molasses), but over time good planning, good planting and good crop management will lead to good production.

It’s as true in the blogosphere as it is on the farm.

Seth Godin, obviously having read and taken to heart some of the words of old what’s his name, steps forward with his take on the noisy blogosphere.

As those rocky places where many of our words could find no purchase (I can cut loose with my own brand of literary reference every once in a while) fall away before the flattening forces of the citizen media movement (alliteration and pretense- put me in coach, I’m ready), the once ordered nature of the blogosphere becomes the cacophony of the masses (I’m in the zone; is it me writing these words or Nick Carr?).

The result is too many voices competing for too few ears. A situation Seth compares to the tragedy of the commons. The real tragedy for common folks, of course, is that none of us have any idea what that is. So I took one for the team and looked it up for us.

It’s a parable, sort of like the ones Jesus and Andy Griffith used to tell.

Between those two great parable tellers came some guy named William Forster Lloyd (he has three names so you know he was smart; four names means you’re both smart and rich). He told a story that was later told by Garrett Hardin in Science magazine.

The parable uses a lot of fancy words to say that if a lot of people compete for the use of a shared resource (be it a grazing pasture, a fishing pond or the blogosphere), the end result is overuse, which is bad for everyone. It’s the smart guys’ version of the prisoner’s dilemma.

The end result for the blogosphere, according to Seth, is that to save it we have to use it differently. The autonomous collective (the literary references keep on coming) different- through restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (which is what Seth manifestly advocates). Or the feudal different- with the lords within the castle and the fiefs without (which he doesn’t mention directly, but it’s the blogosphere’s zoning and paper equivalent).

Asking the citizenry of the blogosphere (far too many of whom are chasing the almighty dollar) to be reasoned in their use of the shared blogosphere is like asking people not to litter.

Those of us who are willing not to litter are already not littering. Others will turn a deaf ear to the plea, even while remorsefully tossing a candy wrapper out the window.

So if we know the autonomous collective approach is doomed to failure, what is left?

That is the question.

Update: Scott Karp says the answer is more metadata and better filters.

Steve Rubel makes a good point about gatekeeping in a flat world.

Everyone’s a gatekeeper- not for keeping people out, but for putting information in.

Also note Amy Gahran‘s always interesting perspective in Steve’s Comments.

Steve’s post was inspired by this one by Jeff Jarvis. Jeff’s post is mostly about gatekeeping in the news media and public relations context, in preparation for some radio or TV show Jeff is appearing on to talk about Walmargate.

I don’t have any strong opinions one way or the other about Walmargate, other than to wonder what’s so different about what Walmart did and developers wining and dining bloggers, giving them free access to products and applications, and writing emails asking a blogger to review their product that contain feature summaries (parts of which often find their way into a blog post), etc. I’m not saying that opaque is good- I’m simply saying that if transparency is required, it should be required across the board.

Anyway, there are some other things in Jeff’s post that I find interesting.

Let’s start with this:

The problem with gatekeepers is that they try to control, to get in the way, to keep us from getting what we want.

Sort of Jeff, but in the context of the blogosphere that’s the indirect result of the bigger concern- keeping control of the microphone. Sure, that means that readers don’t get content they might want, but many of them probably don’t know they want it because the microphone holders fill the space pretty well.

Wanting to be the only one talking is different from wanting to be the only one being heard. The concern is not so much that a reader is getting a new perspective on an issue; it’s that “someone else is trying to use my platform to be heard.” It’s more of a musical chairs sort of thing. If that new guy is sitting down then one of us might be standing up when the music stops. It’s front end, not back end.

Again, I’m largely over the gatekeeper thing, which is why I focused on and started with Steve’s flattened earth comment. There are people out there who still want to silence the new voices, but:

(a) there are less of them than I originally thought; and

(b) the flattening forces at play in the blogosphere make it very hard to keep people out of the proverbial club.

Clearly some folks have a conscious or (perhaps, but not likely) unconscious desire to withhold conversation from without their favored peer group. Jeff strongly implies he’s not one of them, and I’ll take him at his word.

More often than not, the lack of a response is because the intended recipient didn’t see the post, as opposed to some sort of exclusionary practice. Not all the time, but more often than not.

He later updated his post to mention Steve’s post and say he hopes we’re not all gatekeepers. I think it’s a matter of semantics.

We are gatekeepers, the same way entrance ramps are gates to the freeway.

For example, I wouldn’t have heard about much of the stuff I write about if I hadn’t seen a reference to it somewhere- on My Yahoo, on a blog in my reading list, in the newspaper. Someone was an entrance ramp and put that information on the – tired metaphor alert- information superhighway (ugh!).

The onramps are always open- anyone can drive.

We just need to keep working to make it like that in the blogosphere.