On blogging

Donald Sensing recently reappeared on his One Hand Clapping site to talk about the solitary blogger, which he believes is the backwards-propagating wave of the past. On that I'd like to comment a bit.

He's right--it's hard for individuals to carry on blogging day after day and produce anything consistently worth reading while maintaining a family life, social life, or that necessary evil known as a full time job. The big bloggers like Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Josh Marshall and Little Green Footballs seem to have found the secret, but those are few out of millions. The rest of us just have too much to do.

Take today for example--gotta get some yard work done before the rain, kid is going to prom, relatives in town, honey-do's, you know the drill. Therefore, it's hard enough to get this post out, which as Sensing says is not liable to change the world. Heck, let's let him speak a moment:

But, as I noted in a comment at “Last Home,” the vast majority of blogs have low readership now, and by that I mean in the dozens. So did mine for a long time.

Different people blog for different reasons and 100 or so readers per day may be quite satisfactory to them. It was to me for a long time, too. I didn’t seek higher numbers, they just came. But the fact is that low-readership blogs are not significant in importance to the blogosphere at large, no matter how important they are to their authors or few-dozen readers.

Increasingly, team blogs and blogs integrating different media will dominate the ’sphere, By “dominate,” I mean attract the vast majority of readers and have the most influence in larger society. Yes, Logtar, I do know there are blogs that discuss knitting and they are important to their authors and readers, but frankly, get a grip: they are utterly unimportant to everyone else and have no effect whatsoever in larger society.

I’m not trying to demean those kinds of blogs at all; let me re-emphasize that they are obviously important to their authors and readers. But the vast majority of readers, as well as the ad money that blogs will increasingly generate, will revolve around fairly few blogs.

He may be right, if we presume all bloggers are looking to get rich and famous or affect regional or national (or world) politics. For those looking to have impact on the local level, or to just issue a post about something that interests them every now and then, it doesn't matter. However, secretly I suspect that many of us want at least a sliver of richness, fameness or notariety or we wouldn't be here. It varies.

Like most sites, Fore Left was started as merely an alternative to message boards. I'd been wandering through that world since the 90s, but wanted a better way to offer my opinion, my voice, on current events and politics without being controlled by other forces. Although blogs can get nasty just like message boards, at least there is more personal control.

As to joint-effort sites, they are only easier if one doesn't maintain (and desire to keep) a personal site. In my case, Mainstreet Journal offered me the opportunity to contribute, which was both humbling and exciting, but admittedly it's been tough getting enough content together for both efforts. And that seems to prove the point he was trying to make, I believe.