Fernando Gros posted this morning on widecasting and narrowcasting:

“I do notice I prefer blogs that are not just content-rich, but also link-rich (and even conversation rich). To me this adds a degree of depth to the experience of the blog. By contrast, I don’t like to link blogs that have no comments or few links because they tend to provide little by way of discourse context; they feel conversationally shallow to me (despite how good their main content may be).”

A shallowcast blog, in Fernando’s terms, has a narrow focus, draws you in specifically to its conent but in some ways is like a room with only one or two doors. He describes a deepcast blog as having many doors, and possibly many ways of enjoying the view. Perhaps because of the number of comments, the wealth of links or the breadth of secondary information usually in the sidebar.

Content isn’t everything. Food for thought isn’t it. ‘Pacific Highlander’ is one of several blogs under my care at the moment. I’ll be taking another look at each of the sites to consider the relational quotient.

Of course developing a community of commenters is no easy thing. Duncan’s TV Ad Land has a number of posts with vibrant conversation over controversial or particularly brilliant ads. And of course the site is designed to point people to other sites. Just this last week I added a list of other advertising blogs. But references to other blogs in the sidebar don’t compare to the value of mentioning the posts of other bloggers.

Fernando mentions XFN at the end of his post – which stands for XHTML Friends Network. For more on this see this site.

And by the way, did you know that Fernando’s a jazz guitarist and composer with a profile at Berklee.