Blog navel gazing

Yes, we all have to do it from time to time.

Here's Steve Gilliard's latest meditation on the subject: Blogs are more popular than opinion magazines 11/22/04.

What amazes me is not that so many people read the site, but that readership has increased over that period, and not by one or two percent, either. All of the leftside blogs have had MORE traffic after the election than before.  ...

The next move will be to pay regular contributors for their work, as the profitability grows. Right now, more people read this site than the print edition of any opinion magazine, from the Nation to the The National Review. It is only a matter of time before advertisers realize that their demographics and ad dollars are better spent online on blogs than in print magazines. And my blog is dwarfed by Kos and Atrios.

He also has an interesting speculation about the obsolescence of The Drudge Report:

His rise to prominance only came about because reporters are lazy. But as his competitors like Blue Lemur/Raw Story actually break news, people will find Drudge's agregeation [sic]outdated. While agregation [sic] has a value, his sensibility was fresh a few years back. Now it's outdated. His layout alone is reader unfriendly. I mean, someone is eventually going to call him on his personal contradictions: a gay conservative man. If he doesn't think the fundies are coming for him, well, he's gonna learn the hard way.

The cartoonist Tom Tomorrow seems to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with his blog.  He periodically grumps about the whole concept.  But he can't seem to stop, either.  He cautions bloggers about letting a little attention go to our heads:

I guess you have to have a fairly high opinion of yourself to keep one of these little weblogs, but you also need to keep things in perspective. A little bit of attention and a few small victories do not change the fact that you are still, for the most part, a novelty act, like a horse that can count by stomping its hooves. People may be amused and interested by the horse, but they aren't going to give him tenure in the math department at a prestigious university.

Darn, I guess that means no offers for me any time soon of that chair of theology at Notre Dame, huh?  Oh, well, I guess I'll have to hold on to my day job a while longer.

Juan Cole compares blogging to political pamphlets in the days of the American Revolution:

Speaking of press coverage, The Independent has a piece on VanityFair.com , the magazine's lively Web offering. The Independent quotes contributing editor James Wolcott as saying that bloggers are "the best thing to hit journalism since the political pamphlet." It seems to me that this characterization of weblogs as a form of "political pamphlet" is historically suggestive. Robert Darnton's work on the 18th century Grub Street as a context for the Enlightenment has shown the importance of pamphleteering. May we be so luck as to get a major intellectual movement out of all this blogging!

A major intellectual movement!?!  Yikes!  I'll be happy if I ever learn how to post pictures and graphics like AOL-Jer Marcia Ellen.

Meanwhile, Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell have an article on blogs in Foreign Policy Nov/Dec 2004. 

Blogs are becoming more influential because they affect the content of international media coverage. Journalism professor Todd Gitlin once noted that media frame reality through “principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters.” Increasingly, journalists and pundits take their cues about “what matters” in the world from weblogs. For salient topics in global affairs, the blogosphere functions as a rare combination of distributed expertise, real-time collective response to breaking news, and public-opinion barometer. What’s more, a hierarchical structure has taken shape within the primordial chaos of cyberspace. A few elite blogs have emerged as aggregators of information and analysis, enabling media commentators to extractmeaningful analysis and rely on blogs to help them interpret and predict political developments.

Alack and alas and so forth, Old Hickory's Weblog is not ranking among the "elite blogs."  Like I said, day job and all.  (Actually, I like my day job.)

At the end of the Drezner/Farrell piece, there are links to other articles on blogging, and blog links scattered through the article itself.  One of the blog articles is by Drezner and Farrell, The Power and Politics of Blogs July 2004.  If the latter sounds familiar to AOL-J'ers, it may be because John Scalzi at the AOL mothership blog linked to it back when it first came out: A Scholarly View of Blogging.