<http://newyorkmetro.com/news/media/15967/index.html>
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This article seems accurate enough. It certainly captures the way things are flowing amongst the blog elite (we need a new word to label this group – something like bl33t but, unlike that, non-awful).
There’s another way of seeing all this.
My own attitude towards blogs has flowed in different, sometimes contradictory, directions over the past few years. At first, it seemed like a good enough idea – a chance for clever people with clever things to say to find an audience: small or large (think “McSweeney’s Internet Tendency” and ”The Floating World” in their heyday of a twinkling of an eye ago).
After the destruction of the Twin Towers, the era of political blogging began in earnest. Suddenly a flood of opinions – some reasonable, some well informed, others as mad as a B movie scientist’s world domination via giant, robot ants soliloquy – exploded onto our screens. The endless debates and half-formed (at best) ‘analyses’ of corporate-provided news items drove me into a cave.
At that unfortunate moment, blogs appeared to be a sort of vortex to an ever-in-motion -but never forward moving - chatter.
Then I noticed that people with specialized knowledge – in economics, physics, the Middle East, aerospace tech, literature, feminism, etc – were blogging. This re-energized my interest in the form because I was actually learning new things instead of virtually hearing louder and louder shouting matches between “liberals” and “conservatives” about the comparative evils of Dan Rather and Ann Coulter (among other go-nowhere topics).
These ‘expert blogs” (I think that’s the term of art now) are really where the meat of the matter is to be found.
But that’s not the topic of the New York Metro piece. What they’re on about is popularity and, as the article points out, this is often as much a function of frequency of post, linky love, ability to stir a pot and other factors as anything else.
The desire to be popular and profitable is natural enough and I surely understand it.
My own wee effort is but a hobby and data dump for various ideas. Achieving A-list status seems about as likely as waking up one morning to read an advert announcing the Paris Hilton Lecture Series on Quantum Electrodynamics.
.d.
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I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked. --- R. Chandler