Blogging

JFA mentioned my writing in the comments and I thought I'd talk about blogging a bit on the main page..

First, thanks for the compliment.

It does take an awful lot of effort to write multiple opinions a day. You should see the initial drafts. I have to self-edit myself like crazy. It doesn't come as easy to me as it does some people...

Since most of you read other liberal blogs, you probably notice I write about the same topics and stories that other sites like americablog, kos, and atrios do. I think I'm angrier than they are (at least from outward appearances), and I am not presenting myself as being some sort of blogging star, therefore I can get away with a harder edge. I can also get away with posting copyrighted images, because nobody really cares.

I call people "stupid fucking morons", and it's rather cathartic for me. The big boys can't do that too much, otherwise they seem just shrill instead of scholarly, as they try and present themselves. They get invited to appear on Air America Radio, or a cable political talk shows. After a while, it seems in the rarified blog-o-sphere, the important part is the impression that you give. Lefties like to be smart, therefore you see a lot of writing that stylistically says "I'm a very smart guy". I take a more direct approach, and I'm not so concerned with style.

Read some right wing blogs, like the Free Republic, and it seems their writers strive to sound like idiots in order to appeal to their "base".

I work on finding my own news items to comment on, or dig up other more original material, but it's not easy to do. Atrios and Kos have literally thousands upon thousands of junior reporters sending them tips. They get paid for advertising on their blogs, and receive donations. It is their full time job.

I think I probably write more opinion than Atrios - but then he's kind of left the whole blogging thing behind. He's moving on to bigger and better things, which is becoming a "star" in his own right. He's traveling, consulting for Democrats and writing for main-stream media - even as a very harsh critic of main-stream media.

At some point, the underground rock band sells out and signs their soul away for the big record deal. Some of the big time bloggers are in danger of doing the same.

I just checked - yesterday Atrios wrote 863 original words (unusually heavy day for him), and I wrote 1463. I have a full time job. Blogging is his full time job. I'm not patting myself on the back or anything, because clearly the content of what he writes is more significant than mine. It just points to the very large investment that goes into writing commentary - even when I know I'm really not very good at it.

I'm also something of a fish out of water. The big time bloggers are generally journalists, economists, or other politically connected professionals to begin with. I'm a code monkey. I could describe with expertise the algorithm I wrote that collapses conditional branching from 30 lines of code down to 3 by clever use of indirection, but who really cares?

In other words, I think to be successful in blogging, and attract more than 40 readers a day, you have to play to your strengths and I'm not doing that. I'm playing to my own sense of political outrage, plus throwing out a ping to my friends and family to let them know that I'm still alive. But, in the end, I never started this to be read by more than a handful of people a day.

Word count in this post: 632
Time to write this post: 30 minutes
Significance: 0