There have been a slew
There have been a slew of recent articles about the blogging 'phenomenon,' like this one in Salon and this one in Newsweek.
After a few months flitting back and forth between various journalist-style blogs, I can honestly say that I’m glad I don’t do that sort of thing. It may look like I do, but I don’t. Newsweek’s Levy writes that the success of the big big blogs seems to be due to the authors’ “working hard, filling a niche, winning a reputation for accuracy, developing sources and writing felicitously.” I’ll indulge myself enough to lay claim to that last one, but I certainly don’t work very hard, I have no reputation that I know of, and no sources whatsoever. Do I fill a niche? Perhaps. But so does a site that sells inflatable sheep.
At any rate, what I have discovered, after a few months of cranking out various screeds, comments, and semi-considered opinions, is that there’s only so much I can say about an event, only so much attention I can pay to a given political situation, only so many rants that I can expel on a subject before it all starts to blur together. It happens everywhere online, I think. If I have to read one more Horowitzian shriek about the evils of reparations, the lunacy of Noam Chomsky, or the leftward bias of American universities, I’ll just nip off and shoot myself. I get it, David. Now you’re boring.
Similarly, you can pretty much guess where Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, or Stephen Green is going to come down on a given issue. Someone like James Lileks is a treasure because he’s got the big funny head and is able to amuse. But by and large, the “blogosphere” seems to be roughly akin to the Mutual Admiration Societies we all knew and loved in high school. The practice of mutual linking effectively raises the Google rankings of various sites, an excellent example of viral cross-marketing.
Me? I am the anti-blogger. In a fit of manic paranoia, I killed Astonished Head last weekend by deleting the index page, just as the Google spiders were trying to index the site. Ha! Take that, you creepy-crawly blog-rolling purveyors of self-aggrandizing punditry! I spit on your haircuts.
At any rate: this is going to get weirder before it gets better, so if you’re into that sort of thing, dear reader, continue visiting.
