There has been a corporatization and consolidation of the conservative blogosphere, and the kindness to strangers seems to be waning.I would agree with that. To me, it looks like cliques have formed and celebrities made. The big boys link to the hip bloggers, mostly each other, and the small fry remain unseen. As a small fry who has blogged longer than most, I take a benevolent view of it.
First off, the Internet is big. There, I said it. I know that seems like a crazy concept, but work with me here, people.
Who has the time or the inclination to surf all over God's creation looking for new talent? If you're a big blogger, there are other things to do with your day. If you can get your content published quickly and easily with yet one more link to Via Meadia, all the better. The dry cleaning has to be picked up and the dogs walked and it's not like Joe Blogger from Podunk is going to be all that original.
Therein lies the problem.
How many ways can you write about what a jug-eared loser Barack Hussein Obama is? How many angles are there when ranting about the end of the world through debt monetization? Many other subjects are practically boundless, but politics is an intellectually limited subject. That's why Tim's blog is always fresh and the political bloggers are repetitive. We're not building upon each other's work as scientists do, we're re-shouting that same things as everyone else.
Meh.
So Instapundit links to Hot Air who regurgitates something they saw on Breitbart who posts a video shot by LiveAction. Nowhere in the loop do we get to see the awesome writing talents of Joe Blogger from Podunk. Oh well. I'm not sure we missed much. My stuff certainly isn't all that original, even when I think it is. Distilled down, it all says the same thing over and over again.
I gave up on garnering the big traffic long ago. I can't stay on subject and I'm not willing to rant and rave every day. It's exhausting. I'm always pleased and honored when one of the big boys links to me and I get a brief spike in traffic, but it's OK to be Joe Blogger from Podunk. I can do whatever I want with the 'Post* and I don't have a huge following that will be disappointed when I wander away from the EuroDebt Crisis and take up Newcastle United's effort to avoid relegation.
Wigan beat West Brom? Really? Were the West Brom players drunk or something? Sickening.
So anyway, I'll leave you with this. How many newspapers does a city need? How many TV channels do you watch? How many big-time right wing bloggers can the blogosphere support?
I'm happy being a small fry. I'll leave the heavy-traffic politics to the cool kids.
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| A bee on a positively ginormous flower in our front yard. The thing must be 30' tall at least. The flower, not the bee. If the bee was 30' tall, I wouldn't be taking photos of it, I'd be running into the house and calling Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. Considering I'd be killed as collateral damage in the ensuing airstrike, that would be a bad decision, but there you have it. |
5 comments:
I think you can leave the word "conservative" out of your first quote, and it will still be true. Blogs, and the traffic to them, are changing in general. Most people have settled on their favorite places to visit, and that's where they go, with only occasional excursions to other sites.
A funny thing I've noticed on mine is that, while the traffic is holding steady, the number of unique visitors is only about half to two-thirds what it was last year. Which means that fewer people are visiting, but they are visiting twice as often. Which is fine by me, because it means that a higher proportion of the people who visit are actually interested in what is being posted.
Also, I bet that if you did have a 30-foot bee in your yard, posting the pictures on your blog would really boost your traffic! And you could string it out for a period of many days, or even weeks. Maybe you wouldn't need to die in that air strike after all.
Twitter has changed things. Facebook, too, to some degree.
BTW - don't give up. You have one of the best blogs out there, precisely because you DO have a variety of things to talk about. The garden, the photos, the pets, the raising of the kids, the politics, the tech - love it.
I pulled out to some extent, but put my efforts into getting our local Republicans online, with the idea that we could get people up to speed and keep them informed, by giving them the news they don't get from any of their usual sources.
So, it's not original content, because it isn't my space to opine, more of a news aggregator - here http://www.hrwf-ca.org/ - also getting them, and the Central Committee set up with Facebook and Twitter and whatever other weapons will help them in the next election.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into the new battlespace, and the new century.
It's a work of art, though, using the blog platform as both a traditional website, but with the nimbleness to add interaction and comments. Using Scribd, and other services - all free, for a group that has no money to waste.
Rose, thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate that.
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