But perhaps this tool is another step on the way to a monocultural weblogging community, where there are only a few voices audible, and all else is buried under. I have been thinking about this for some time. (See Weblog communities as islands: improving diversity and How to choose links).

I fear that the current weblogging toolset is serving a nonexisting (?) need for unity of purpose and world view. Perhaps there should become available new tools to suggest different choices than what your current local community of webloggers can provide. Or perhaps the widening of horizon is up to the bloggers themselves: they should actively try to spread their net of contacts wider.

Similar things happen with music. For example, hiphop started about 25 years ago (I'm not a fan so I may be wrong). At first, this music was something nobody knew to want, so it took some time to find new listeners. Nowadays hiphop is mainstream. There is still creativity but perhaps the real inventions in music happen elsewhere.

But how to discover the new developments? How should a tool to "search for new interesting music" work?

To make weblogging sustainable, there should be tools for discovering new and active communities, mapping them, and telling others about them. These tools could function as a travel agency for deciding on what island to take a vacation, and on what island there is good food for thought. (Thanks for Michelle Legare for suggesting this idea in her comment.)

These "suggest new music" (or "travel agency") tools are difficult to build. For example, I have had several times bad experiences of the Amazon music rankings. The reviews can be fine, and the cd may have gotten 4 or 5 starts, but still that music stinks (for me). How to build a tool which can also judge how my current taste could be developed?

This is a big problem also in the music business (or in music as an art form). Of course, the real genius in music is to making something new, so that it is a bit different from the current offerings, but familiar enought so that people will start to listen (and want more).

However, the diversity (or the lack of it) in weblog communities will be an essential factor in the success of weblogs. Too much similarity caused by, e.g., dominance by a few weblogs will kill the community. Thus measuring the referrals and making it easy to find out the "popular" weblogs may ultimately cause the whole system to collapse. It would be more useful to have tools for finding original thoughts and viewpoints on the interesting current subjects.

The weblog toolmakers should develop new search tools, which don't put too much emphasis on the popularity of a site. This would help the weblog ecosystem to survive: most of the weblog views and referrals would not be concentrated only on a few dozen weblogs, and new original thinking could have a chance to emerge.