[sunday blogfocus] can this medium ever be viable

L’Ombre de l’Olivier touches on this. He’s really writing about a particular book deal an American blogger secured but he touches on the principle of the viability of blogging via bookdeals: This is where I get to be the party pooper. You see, first of all I read this from the Boston Herald:

Not so long ago, having a popular blog was the ultimate “in” to get yourself a book deal. Now? Not so much. Bloggers, buoyed by site meter numbers and Internet buzz, were the darling of the publishing world about two years ago. But when books hit the shelves, sales fizzled, and now it takes a lot more than a laptop and a blogspot account to make it onto Amazon’s top 100.

“They haven’t performed as well as publishers hoped,” said Boston-based literary agent Jill Kneerim. “It is still a phenomenon that people are hopeful about, but in many cases, people who are fans of the blog have already read the content. So what’s the point in buying the book?”

Well you might claim that this is just America (and you could be right) but Belle de Jour seems less that perfectly pleased with her book sales and I'm fairly sure that Tim W's Blogged is now on special 2 for the price of 1 discount at your local remainder store. So a £400,000 2 book advance looks like a bad move from Penguin because, at least in N America, the blogger-authors are less than commercially successful.

Which comes back to the heaving, blogging masses. As in any field there are those a cut above and at the other end, the depressing sight of millions of half literate Mozzas or Kazoombahs or Flighty Chicks, whose cool idea is as a candle burning for sometime before slowly flickering out and eventually being abandoned altogether. Was there ever a sight more depressing than a disused blog, a ghost town in cyberspace? Even three on my blogroll seem to have already gone this way.

Chris Dillow, in his leftist, egalitarian manner, offers a more hopeful picture, writing this week about non-involvement with the MSM. He gives three reasons:

1. Blogging is a completely different activity. It's a conversation between equals, not ex cathedra statements of "fact." This contrast always strikes me when I compare my blog with my day job. In the latter, I come across as an arrogant bastard, to a greater degree than I do in the blog. This is … because the architecture of blogging, the links and comments, allows for an egalitarian democratic debate [which] is missing from the MSM, where there'll always be a them and us.

2. The MSM is profit-oriented. And profit-making sometimes excludes other ideals. You have to give readers what they want, rather than tell them awkward truths. You have to pretend to be well-informed, because people pay for expert knowledge, not for the opinion of any idiot. Honesty and egalitarianism can therefore disappear. And even when they don't (for example) in my day job, openness does disappear; my articles are behind a subscription wall.

3. The MSM won't change. It will always be hierarchical, deferential to "experts" and "senior figures", and obsessed with gossip. For this reason, I don't like Mike Ion's idea of what blogging's about: Blogs ... influence important actors within mainstream media who in turn frame issues for a wider public. I don't think this is true. And I hope it isn't. For me, the ideal isn't to influence "important actors", but to abolish them - in both the MSM and in politics. And because this ideal is unattainable, the next best thing is to ignore them.

At the risk of sounding pretentious (pretentious, moi?), I prefer to take my lead from Alasdair MacIntyre. There's a parallel between our hierarchical MSM and political elite and the late Roman Empire: A crucial turning point...occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.

What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness ... For some time now we too have reached that turning point.

If you’re any good as a writer, if you have an angle to pursue and if you persevere, you might get the numbers up someway above the standard by means of judicious linking, trackbacks and interaction with other bloggers and the Prodicus question then arises – should that be your purpose? What is your purpose? To write? To make money? To build a readership? I mean – what do you actually think you are doing?

Should one diversify? Click on the 18 Doughty Street badge to the left here and you’ll see real diversity within an alternative media framework, free from Chris Dillow’s listed MSM constraints. Does this sort of thing put the wind up the MSM? I’ve been meaning to ask Iain Dale about this. He's certainly busy: We're all very excited by how the reporters network is building. Paul Burgin from the Mars Hill blog and Rachel from North London have picked up their cameras and we're looking forward to their contributions. There are two comments about this – that he has the ‘in’, the contacts to do this sort of thing. Then there is the logical response – how did he get them in the first place? He worked at it. That’s how. To me it seems too much like bloody hard work.

Actually, there’s a third comment by Prodicus returned: Who's funding 18 Doughty Street? Prodicus merely asks. Along with a few others. So far, no answer. I ask, ‘Who cares?’

My Apple friend asked me two questions yesterday: What is your viability cut off point? At which minimum visitor figure would you be satisfied? The second question was how far can you go? To the second, to paraphrase Field of Dreams, if you build it, if you fill the niche, they’ll come. Give it time, construct the edifice, don’t deviate from your core market, follow up contacts, remain relevant, expand your range and it will grow like any business.

Except that it isn’t a business, is it?

Political bias is an issue. Clive Davis quotes Hugh Hewitt: The reason talk radio exploded, followed by Fox News, followed by the centre-right blogosphere, is that because folks like you have been the dominant voice in American media for a long time [meaning the leftist media 15 to 20 to 1 ratio]. A scan of just my blogroll reveals it to be rightist in the main and you might well say this shows my political bias. Actually it shows my liking for good writing, that’s all.

Should blogging have a mission? Gavin Ayling says: It will be interesting to see how powerful blogs are in achieving an apparently simple aim. Sign the pledge to campaign against anti-semitism (which is on the rise again).

Serf asked people: If any of my fellow Eurosceptic Bloggers are interested, I have set up a mailing list for likeminded souls. The idea is that we can share ideas and stories, and maybe coordinate some actions. If you are interested …

However, when I asked him what can be done by us on the EU, I was lightly admonished: James, I am sure you have guessed my view, but this blog is designed to show up the EU's idiocies and let people make up their own mind.

Reactionary Snob mentions Tim Worstall’s fisk this week: A quite beautiful fisk from Timmy. I like my fisking to be violent, visceral and, if at all possible, extremely offensive. Tim shows that you can do things with a much lighter touch if, of course, you have the talent, with which Mr. Eugenides agreed: Quite so. Come to the pub; but I answered: And yet the Timmy touch provides a nice counterpoint, no?

Tim Worstall: A "passionate" campaign to defend human rights legislation against its critics will be launched by the Government this evening. Trial by jury. Politicians and members of the media who attack human rights "attack us all", he will say. Double jeopardy. Tim concludes: Tell me, who was Lord Chancellor while all these attacks on our liberties were going on? Is he going to attack himself?

The P-G did what I see as the true purpose of blogging – putting an idea and seeing what people thought of it. His EU chart was scrutinized by many and maybe it's a different take on that monolithic monstrosity.

Linking is the lifeblood of blogging for many of us. For example, I here link to Stephen Pollard, who in turn links to this - the idea of who would be in your dream-cabinet. Same point, incidentally, which I put to Tim Worstall last week.

DK seems to have got it into his head, along with a few others, that the purpose of the blog is to demonstrate one’s freedom [understandable in an old Etonian staying with his Pater] and freedom means the right to fill the space with expletives:

We're all f---ed. The nurses are f---ed because they are going to have a hard time getting jobs, and we're all f---ed because we will be receiving injections from someone who hasn't been taught how to administer one in the three f---ing years that she was at college!

Actually, his stance is a smokescreen, as many are well aware that the man is an absolute gentleman and I use the term as a personal affront, not as a comment on birth. Plus, he can write and is an example of a blogger with a cult following.

Which brings us to whether that’s satisfying or not – not the swearing but the cult following? I'd say yes. Yes, I’d continue on that basis if I knew there were people waiting for me to get out of bed and assault the blogwaves with my vitriol. You’d have to, somehow, wouldn’t you?

Finally we come to this pesky question of linking. Most of us see it as the lifeblood of blogging [DK in particular wrote on this last week] and yet Oliver Kamm is diametrically opposed. He and Norman Geras had this exchange:

Oliver Kamm wrote: I try never merely to link to or quote another writer, for what otherwise is the purpose of a web log?

Norman replied: One response might be that the purpose is to allow you to do just what you feel like doing [or] to draw the attention of your readers to something they might otherwise not see [or] to endorse someone else's view on an issue, where you think their view is cogently put [or] simply to disseminate information. And, of course, these purposes can sometimes overlap.

Not all blog readers roam the internet all day, and there's no reason to suppose that every visitor to a particular blog will know about what the blogger quotes or links to. That, anyway, is why I do some of what Oliver says he tries not to do. But I'm not saying he needs to change his ways. Different roads.

Oliver Kamm’s next words were, in fact: But sometimes I find my own views so cogently expressed elsewhere that there is little purpose in embellishment.

Therefore, it seems [and I may be reading it wrongly], that he feels it’s OK to link and quote in that context.

More on Wednesday.