Refreshing honesty – From Begging to Differ: “Let’s face it, this blog sucks”
Steve makes some good points (that I can empathize with) about how political blogs tend to be echo chambers which are drowned out anyway by Instapundit and the other “professional” bloggers. But, hey, what are you gonna do?
3 comments:
Some good points there. Lots of difficulties in keeping fresh, worthwhile material these days. And when I do produce original content, I wonder if the benefits are even worth the time and effort.
This is true especially when I send it to the bigger bloggers and they don't link it. THEN, many days later, I sometimes see the bigger bloggers linking to the same basic information I had on my site, but not as well-done as I did it a week or two earlier. That is always supremely discouraging.
And meta-apathy is a great point. I just added a second co-blogger a couple weeks back or so to lighten my load a bit... and he has yet to make a post. Ugh.
I think I may soon make a point of not blogging for about 3 days out of the week. No blogging at all on those days. We'll see.
It rejected my comment over there, it seems, so I will post it here:
Nice post. I feel ya.
I also hate that so much of my traffic is from old image searches. I hate that so many crappy blogs get so much traffic and attention and space on google news and yahoo and stuff. I hate the clique-ish nature of blogging. I hate these Weblog Awards, even though I am nominated for one and would appreciate winning. I hate getting spam comments and trackbacks all the time. I hate getting uninformed comments from idiots. Why are these people even reading my blog? Shouldn't it be over their heads? I hate it when blogging feels like an obligation. And it feels like an obligation a lot lately.
And on top of all that, with no election, there is less at stake. People are less tuned in. There is less going on. This should be a time to debate ideas and policies and important things like that. It should be a time for radically changing our entitlement programs and our tax policies. Instead, this low-level, perpetual campaign goes on for what seems like eternity. About nothing.
Blah. It's tedious. But I go on, because occasionally it is VERY rewarding. Occasionally, in the sea of spam and hate mail, I get a true piece of fan mail, or a nice donation, or some other bit of encouragement.
I started off just like you, thinking I'd do movie and tv and book reviews, sports news, personal anecdotes, fun facts, serious journalistic type stuff, well-done opinion, poll updates and prognostications, and so on. But it just saps the time to do all those things.
I think I may start setting goals on my readership (which has increased substantially and persistently in the past 10-11 months). If I don't meet those goals after giving it my honest best shot, it may be time to hang up the keyboard and focus on something else to channel these energies and ideas.
I agree with him to a large degree, although there is still room for people to take the time to get expertise in an issue/topic, blog the heck out of it, and get noticed when that issue becomes hot. I devoted a lot of time to Kerry Haters last year, with the result that I'm an expert on the topic of Le Fraude. Of course, much of that's useless knowledge unless he runs again and gets the nomination.
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