Is too much of a good thing a bad thing? The answer to that lies somewhere between black and white, in the very depths of gray.


The easier question to answer is this: When many of us are doing the same thing, do customers and clients benefit? The obvious answer is yes, because choice allows individuals to shop for just the right product or service to meet their needs.
But what about when there is so much of something that it all begins to look the same and in addition there are no editors or experts and little ability of customers and clients to get help in filtering the good from the bad? Who, if anyone, benefits then?
In the business world, natural selection mostly prevents that from happening, as those businesses who are most successful in reaching their customers with quality products and services that meet wants and needs live on, the rest die. That's also true in the world of publishing, at least it was until the internet became the place where anyone can be heard, whether or not they have anything to say or whether or not they know of what they write.
For example, let's take the blogosphere. More specifically, let's narrow it down to those blogs purporting to offer business advice. I can't say how many blogs are represented in that category, but I suspect we are talking thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Is that a good thing? Does it lead to more of the same? Is it akin to flooding the market with toys from China, where quality control is mostly absent from the process? How good, or different, can most of that advice be?
Natural selection doesn't seem to work in the blogosphere as most bloggers don't blog for a profit, many if not most don't have measurable goals to achieve, and as we learned last week from my post called 10 Tips for Keeping Your Blog Fresh, at least more than a few don't write for their readers but for themselves. So there are no set triggers to eliminate blogs and bloggers if they aren't achieving a profit, goals or meeting the wants and needs of readers. Is that a good thing, is it troubling or does it matter?
So I ask again: Is too much of a good thing a bad thing? How will readers judge what business advice is trustworthy and credible without a process to eliminate blogs that offer less value than others? Do we live in a world where quality of voice is less important than the opportunity to have a voice? Are readers served well when there is so much to choose from and when what they have to choose from cannot be judged except by the individual who may not have the ability to know whether or not they are buying a great product or a lousy product and there are no places to turn to get that information? In other words, there are no blogosphere "Consumer Reports." Maybe there should be one?