[blogosphere] on blogging, hate mail and the whole biz

First, replies to Prodicus:

I hardly expected to be read at all, but it seems I have been, and the visitor numbers are steadily rising. Bit of a surprise for someone who, like lots of others, I suppose, started blogging just for 'political self-expression', rather than to gain an audience.

Raises two separate questions: why we go into it and why we stay in it. Myself, I’d been a lot in Stephen Pollard’s site and had had a pretty willing debate over Christianity with Stuart A and felt that maybe I should be doing this on my own site, rather than dirtying another person’s.

As for why we stay – that I truly wonder about today. I truly do. More later on this. Prodicus again:

Wherever [reactions] are, the responses come in four types: favourable comments, tend[ing] to come from people of not dissimilar views - in my case, fairly obviously, from the libertarian right, [which is where I am], neutral comments, [from] 'gentleman fiskers', [and f]inally, there are the downright vicious ones from people who, in all seriousness, say they would consign me, for instance, to the gas chambers.

My take:

We go into it and are very quickly, as Prodicus says in his preface, surprised by the reaction. We never really expect real, live readers to actually enter our site and read something we posted. Some of us experiment and try to get our site looking as good as possible and make mistakes along the way.

Very soon, fellow bloggers start to make their appearance [though one doesn’t know that at the time] and the positive comments really surprise. The big mistake, at this point, is to think that they will keep visiting. Sometimes they don’t and they were only wishing you the best. The reason they don’t is:

1] they’re so damned busy themselves they hardly have time to run their own blogs;
2] they’re established bloggers who’ve paid their dues and we’re just the new kid on the block, along with 2 million other hopefuls. There are one or two on my sidebar who are in this category;
3] they only came in to have a look round and check out the new site anyway;
4] it’s – er – not really all that interesting what we’re writing, you know.

We then start our own travels around the blogs and quickly discover fellow travellers, like dsquared [anyone have a link for him?]and Mr. Eugenides; and the learning continues. Then we happen on certain sites which look absolute rubbish - the guy clearly uses bog standard blogger and is rattling off anything coming into his head and he has 100s of comments, many of them even half-articulate, from Scazzer and Mongrel and Ben-e-Boi.

We sit back and consider this.

These guys have big traffic but I’d be ashamed to have my blog looking like that. Then we discover something like this, with a guy who knows how to intrigue, who puts hypotheses, even about religion, in economic terms. Along the way, we stumble upon sites where the man is clearly august but we, in our pig-ignorance, didn’t quite realize that.

On the other hand, certain ex-conservative candidates who brag of their stats and trumpet from the rooftops are quickly consigned to the rubbish bin. Then we find the deep thinkers. They post rarely and their pieces are never short and shallow, such as this one and this one.

About this time, our stats start to play a role and whatever mission statement we had in mind needs to be discarded and a new one put in its place. In my case, I was aiming fairly and squarely at the UK but found the US was coming in on the general pieces and in quite reasonable numbers. Soon the UK and US were neck and neck and it was necessary to cater for both.

My friend wasn’t sure what the blog was about. ‘You put bits in French, in German, about oil and then about Monty Python. What are you trying to do?’ Answer – everything. If it’s interesting or someone spoke rubbish and it needed a reply, I post it.

‘Yes, yes, but what are you? An economist? A journalist? A professor [one of my current jobs, actually]?’

‘Well, that’s the problem – there are a number of fields.’

‘Yes but which one is your speciality – you know – so that people can respect your authority on the topic?’

‘Er – a number of fields.’

‘Hmmm,’ he muses, not so sure.

About this time, certain friendships are struck up with fellow bloggers and the idea of a combined blog [Samizdata like] raises its head. But there must be a reason, mustn’t there? A clear mission statement?

Ho hum. So, by now it’s possible to see a sort of hierarchical continuum:

1] professional bloggers who are also journos and look down their noses at the riff raff like us and who NEVER deign to reply because they’re just too cool;
2] professional bloggers who are also journos and have time for us, like this one, this one and this one;
3] guys with huge followings and you can see how and why, like this one;
4] bloggers with cult followings which make them sort of established, like this, this and this and this, who understand the difficulty of gaining a readership and are all round good eggs;
5] guys with followings and you really, really can’t see how they have such readerships;
6] guys who have been at it for a little while now and have very slowly growing readerships, such as yours truly;
7] the countless millions of hopefuls who have from 2 to 50 readers a day.

It’s mortifying when we find ourselves back at Number 7, having hoped [and the stats seemed to back it up] that we’d maybe got to Number 4 … but no. Days such as today, for example. These are the days which make us wonder if it’s worth it, especially with the lack of time due to our day job. When even our regular readers don’t visit us.

Then suddenly, it shoots up to 400 and we wonder what it was we’ve done to deserve it, the sun comes out and we jauntily post our next piece, sipping on a whiskey and humming a little tune.

Where is the logic in it?

The logic appears to be that you’re only as good as your last post [or at least as your fifteenth last piece which the Google trawl picked up on] and that these hundreds who are visiting us today are doing it on the strength of some old pieces and not on what we currently have on offer.

Then come the comments. I don’t get very many. Don’t know why. It used to worry me but not now. I know the pieces are being read but why no one comments – I just don’t know. This brings us back to Prodicus and his hatemail. I can say I don’t get hate mail because I don’t get any mail. Well, that’s not entirely true.

So what do we do? The answer appears to be to keep posting on things we know about, to do it in a readable way and with factually supported opinions. Should we continue? Possibly. As long as there are even five who value what we do, that seems reason enough to continue.

But there’s one more thing.

I really don’t see this as a competition. It’s like trade – it’s win/win. There’s no finite market in which we’re fighting for market share - it’s an elastic market. I don’t go into 10 sites a day and that’s that. Something might be of interest and I’d go into 20 sites that day, especially if there was a little more time.

I think once we’ve established which blogs we like, we should make a point of going into our preferred colleagues’ blogs and allocating time to read what they have on offer that day. This is quite important. and we should link.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.