"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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Friday, December 29, 2006

Blog Wars, or is the blogosphere really just a geekier version of high school?
Posted by Jill | 10:53 AM
Yesterday I went to lunch and a movie with ModFab -- something we haven't done in a year, and which I've sorely missed. (Our conversation about Happy Feet will follow later today, so those of you -- all three of you -- who have missed the old Mixed Reviews "Critics Over Coffee" feature will get your fix.) We were discussing the state of blogdom, and why our traffic seems to be stuck at a certain point, with very little growth. As ModFab himself wrote yesterday:

2006 will be remembered as the year that blogs became legit. And as the year when blogs went to shit. Is that inflammatory? I hope so, because if the best we've got to offer the world is Perez Hilton, Michele Malkin, and Gawker, we're in trouble. The single greatest danger to this form of communication is codification...it's a medium built upon the premise that every person has value, and that an individual perspective can be more illuminative than a corporate entity.

But in a world of million-hit superblogs and media alpha dogs, it is becoming harder and harder for the individual voice to penetrate through the white noise. This best-of list was harder to write than any other this year, because I simply had trouble locating truly useful, engaging, well-written, information, essential blogs. Lots of detritus, few iconoclasts.


Sometimes it seems as if blogs are going the same route as movie review sites did in the late 1990's. A few of them get bought up by big conglomerates and altered beyond recognition or shuttered; a precious few become going concerns; and the rest of us toil around the edges, building a cult following and little else.

It seems that among culture-related blogs, niche blogs have the best growth potential, yet even among niche blogs, there are the Alpha Dogs -- Towleroad among gay bloggers, David Poland among movie bloggers, and the 800-pound gorilla of political blogging, Markos Moulitsas. There are millions of political bloggers, so it's ever more difficult for any of us to gain any headway, but it's not as if the alpha dogs do much to welcome us into the club.

I'm grateful to Mike Finnegan at Crooks and Liars, Tbogg, Peter Daou and his successor Steve Benen, Pam Spaulding, and the few other luminaries of blogtopia who deign to link to this here blog every now and then. Every time they do, I see a brief spike in traffic.

But while watching Blog Wars on the Sundance Channel last night, about the role bloggers played in the Connecticut Senate primary race this year, it struck me that some of the Big Players portrayed therein are perhaps just a wee tad disingenuous when they tout how people-powered the blogosphere is, and how easy it is to build traffic. Perhaps Markos Moulitsas needs to spout about the worth of the smaller bloggers in order to convince people that he's still just like everyone else, but I'll tell you this much: I met him at a book signing in Hoboken. And no matter how many times I explained that the name on the business card I handed him referred to a progressive political blog and not a bed and breakfast, all he saw was a short, pudgy, middle-aged Jewish woman who probably makes great omelettes in her little country inn.

Now I don't expect the King of All Blogtopia (despite his protestations to the contrary) to visit here, and I don't expect the well-connected Jane Hamsher, who managed, partially but probably not entirely, to become one of the biggest names in the world of progressive blogs because of her involvement in the Connecticut Senate Race, to visit here -- not in a world in which everyone and his cat has a blog. But don't tell me that it's easy to make a mark in this particular community.

There is clearly a hierarchy of blogger influence, and if I may say so, it's not always based on who's the best writer or even the most astute political analyst. For example, Driftglass, who's well-respected even among the big boys and is for my money one of the best writers on the web, doesn't seem to generate a whole lot of comments. Digby's blog Hullabaloo, is recognized by the big and small alike as a must-read resource even though much of it is now written by other bloggers. For my money, no one covers the War on Women in the U.S. like Amanda Mercotte. Apologies if I left anyone out. But sometimes when I compare these blogs, and the hundreds of others I read, some of them extraordinarily well-written, to some of the biggest alpha dogs, such as Atrios with his open threads and four-sentence posts that largely involve quotes from other people, I have to wonder what it's all based on, and whether the blogosphere really is about the writing and the insight, or if it's just a grayer, paunchier version of high school, in which the Chess Club guys are the heads of the Kool Kids Klub and everyone wants to hang with them.

This is the main reason why I chose the bloggers I did to cover while I was on vacation. I might not be a huge player, but there are other people who get even less traffic than I do, if such a thing is possible -- and they deserve to be read as well.

At times I think it would be a good idea to go to the Yearly Kos conference this year, and then I think: "Why, at age 52, which is what I'll be by then, would I want to attend a conference at which I'll be ignored because I'm not hot AND I'm a nobody? Do I need a few thousand people who make enough from Blogads that they don't have to hold down a full-time job looking down their noses at me because I don't get a million hits a month? Didn't I go through enough of that in high school?" And I think that's sad, that a medium so fraught with egalitarian possibility seems to be devolving into just another pecking order, with a few alpha dogs at the top and the rest of us scrambling for scraps -- a keyboard version of Republican America.
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