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Thu. Mar 03, 2005

Blindered on Blogs

I’ve tangled with this whale before. Again, he tasks me:

I’m pro-blog – a reader of many and a admirer of quite a few. But the steady drumbeat about the “revolutionary” nature of blogging is getting out of hand. Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, may be right that “the revolution will be blogged,” but the revolution isn’t about blogging.

In many ways, the real story of the bloggers’ triumph is the story of a right-wing (though not always conservative) populist uprising that started half a century ago. The story begins with National Review’s founding in 1955 and extends through five decades of steady, heavy and difficult work. In the 1970s it was Spiro Agnew’s denunciation of liberal media bias that ultimately resulted in William Safire getting a job at the New York Times. In the Wall Street Journal, the late Robert Bartley’s op-ed page opened a new front in the heart of elite daily journalism.

Left-wing bloggers believe they are part of the same “revolution” as right-wing bloggers are. They’re not. The conservative blogs are the shock troops of a decades-long battle to seize back the culture. Conservatives have always had to rely on “alternative media” – magazines, AM radio, blogs – because the Mainstream Media barred the door to conservatives. And even when they let a few token ones in, they had to be labeled “conservative” first and journalists a distant second. The lefty blogs are something else entirely. They represent – much like the still lame liberal talk radio and the new liberal think tanks – an attempt to copycat conservative successes.

Jonah Goldberg: The medium isn’t the message, actually

In the manner of the proverbial broken clock that’s right twice a day, Jonah gets one thing right at the very start … “the steady drumbeat about the ‘revolutionary’ nature of blogging is getting out of hand.” But then he not only proceeds to hop back on the bandwagon he’s just decried, he engages in revisionist history as distorted through his own partisan glasses (tint: red).

In this view, blogs burst upon the scene as technological extensions of the political realm, having never existed before, except for blogs by “a teenage girl who updates her site a couple times a month with the latest 411 about her prom dress or which Olsen Twin she, like, really likes.”

More than that, Jonah believes blogs burst most brilliantly from the right end of the political spectrum … which he also just happens to coincidentally occupy himself. Even more than that, he claims left-wing blogs are merely an “attempt to copycat conservative successes.” You mean, successes like the fact the most highly trafficked blog, by nearly a two to one margin, is a left wing blog? That’s some good copycattin’!

But forget that partisan blather. The point is, blogs didn’t spring from a political well, left or right. Mr. Goldberg just settled into a cluster of them that appeal to his personal interests, and thus he thinks they emit Nirvana.

You could say the same thing about the Mazda Miata owner who finds a blog-ring dedicated to nothing but their favorite car … “this is why blogs were invented!” The revolution associated with blogs is what some might call personal narrowcasting. No matter your interest, somewhere out there among the 8 million blogs (7,999,900 of which Jonah has never seen), there’s one that matches it … and then some. And if there isn’t, any Joe or Jane can make it themselves.

That’s the revolution. And Jonah’s blinders cause him to only see the reddish portion directly in front of him.

He continues, “According to the blog search-engine firm Technorati, 23,000 new blogs are created every day — or roughly one every three seconds. Let’s imagine, for argument’s sake, that amid this staggering new daily output, 10 excellent, must-read blogs are created — a wildly generous estimate. That means every single day there are 22,990 new blogs on the Internet that almost nobody, save a small group of friends and co-workers, will ever read or care about. That’s fine, but it’s not exactly a sweeping endorsement for the power of the medium as whole.”

You see, that “small group of friends and co-workers” mean absolutely nothing to Jonah. He seeks the power to influence vast audiences, and if you can’t do that, well, “it’s not exactly a sweeping endorsement” for the medium.

Perhaps we’re not all successful on the Main Stream Media terms that would impress Jonah, i.e., 100,000+ readers per day. On those terms, there’s maybe a dozen of the 8 million bloggers out there that Jonah would think qualify as a suitable endorsement for the medium. But that would be a case of someone in the Main Stream Media using their traditional terms to judge a new phenomenon.

I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve never been a “A-List” blogger. In fact, it’s been nearly a year since one has even linked something I wrote. In Jonah’s terms, I’m just a step above that teenage girl blogging about the Olsen twins. I’m certainly outside the popular Red-Blue Blog-Swirl.

Prior to having a blog, on a busy day, perhaps 40 people might have heard my thoughts about whatever was on my mind at that moment. Yesterday, there were 3,074 “user sessions” at this site, for an average of 9 minutes and 24 seconds per session. Translated, those numbers likely represent about 2,000 people visiting this site on Wednesday. In February, there were 88,972 user sessions.

That’s a little bit more than 40 a day, isn’t it? Is the ability for one person to increase their “daily reach” from 40 to over 2,000 “revolutionary”? I would argue it is. But Jonah would judge me on subject matter.

It might shock Jonah, but from my first blog post on July 16, 2000 (an election year), it was over two months before I made even the smallest mention of politics. And that was fairly typical of blogs at that time. Blogs didn’t burst out of any political consciousness, left or right.

Yes, in the past 12 months it is politics that have made blogs more of a “household word” than they were. But for Jonah to claim their success is part of a decades long right wing revolution is both transparent and deceitful.

And predictable.

In my opinion, you could make a strong case that partisan politics is ruining the blogosphere. If you cared enough to devote your time to it. And Jonah might be Exhibit A.