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What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

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Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#51

Post by firebones »

AznHisoka wrote: post #38

I not only miss blogging, but RSS feeds as well. Seems like everyone is ditching it in favor of Twitter and FB

Blogging and RSS feeds are still out there. Ask not why it seems like everyone is moving to Twitter, ask why your perception and tastes have shifted to perceive that as the primary channel?

When I look at this through the Clay Shirky "publish-then-filter" mindset, what I see is that we have a problem with our filters--whether those filters are RSS aggregators, search engines, follower lists, inboxes, subscription services, it doesn't matter. Look to the work of people like Paul Ford (@ftrain) and little hacks like SavePublishing.com.

Solving this filtering problem and creating a focus of attention--that's a huge opportunity. Not Uber huge, or monetarily huge, but huge as a public service to free up the mental capacity of a lot of talented people whose filters are very likely tuned by default to the commercial aggregators.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#52

Post by tsotha »

ddingus wrote: post #8

Nothing at all. I don't see comments on his blog. That's not really blogging. Bloggers, who take comments, actually entertaining community dialog are doing just fine. Sullivan will have no impact as that just isn't what he does.

Comments aren't necessary for a blog. Most people who are trying to make money allow comments because the same people hit the blog over and over when they're bored at work. Pageviews = money.

But comments are a double-edged sword, too. You have to police them or the trolls and stormfront types will chase all the normal people away. So it takes time you could have spent writing.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#53

Post by firebones »

Chevalier wrote: post #9

I'm not Sullivan's biggest fan, but... if Sullivan can't make it as a blogger, who can? Sullivan has a wealthy, educated audience that should be catnip to advertisers -- particularly with his particularly distinct influence among gay and politically liberal niches. He's possibly the most well-known blogger today and his Dish audience piggybacks from his previous work with The Atlantic. And while it's not easy to run…

On the one hand, we're lamenting the death of our nostalgic remembrance of blogging's heyday.

On the other, we're conflating blogging with indie commercial media businesses.

Blogging isn't dead, but indie commercial media businesses may be in their death throes.

Why do we fret? Is it because the listicle is such a mindworm that it has made us forget what we liked about the indie voice? That we can't help ourselves?

There was this saying, "interesting news finds me", meaning that a properly tuned social network and media diet is a good filter for what you should ingest, better than trying to be omnivorous and a slave to fear of missing out (FOMO). Over time, it's become closer to "interesting people find me" as more of my intake comes from the people I follow (and the ones I mute).

But there are great opportunities for us to create better filters, for better routing mechanisms to our short attention spans.

I just don't know whether there will ever be a commercial motivation to create it, or whether there'll be enough of a market willing to give up their FOMO and outsource their self-discipline to consume it...

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#54

Post by firebones »

graeme wrote: post #50
craigching wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine to pick and choose the things you stand for, but the man has to be taken as a whole (IMHO). I want to like Andrew Sullivan for some of the things he stands for, but he was also a vocal proponent of the Iraq war and many other issues that I stand against. Someone who says this about the Iraq war: > the allied campaign was a model of restraint and liberation, the most precise invasion in world history makes m…

What year did Sullivan say that? I recall thinking, circa 2004-6, "gosh, Andrew Sullivan is wrong about Iraq. How does he not see how wrong he is?" But the thing was, he changed. Gradually, he came to notice that the modern Republican party was doing lots of bad things. Certainly, this puts him nowhere near writers like Daniel Davies and James Fallows, who clearly saw the war was going to be a disaster, before it hap…

I ran across this the other night. Pointing you to it because it seems to offer a complementary counterpoint to your benefit of the doubt point of view.

http://pando.com/2015/01/28/andrew-sullivan-is-not-the-futur...

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#55

Post by tsotha »

Andrew Sullivan's exit really doesn't mean very much. Blogging is a lot of work and doesn't pay very well, so it's kind of a surprise he lasted this long. I know a whole lot of people who tried to write a blog, but it's such a grind they pretty much gave up after six months or so (on the outside). The time between posts gets longer and longer in some sort of asymptotic death spiral, and eventually they put up a short post that says, basically, "I quit".

The problem is to keep people interested in your stuff the content has to change multiple times per day. You can't just write a single post every couple days when you feel like you have something important to say - most of your potential readers will drift away.

The vast majority of people trying to make money gave up trying to produce that much content by themselves and joined some sort of group blog (or have "guest bloggers", like Kos). At that point it's less a blog and more of an online magazine. I'm thinking sites like Huffpo and Gawker. As a business/creative model, how are they different from the online presence of The Atlantic or National Review?

Most of the people who still produce all the content on their blog are really just news aggregators. Provide a link, write a joke or a sentence indicating why it's important, and your done with that post.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#56

Post by graeme »

firebones wrote: post #54
graeme wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What year did Sullivan say that? I recall thinking, circa 2004-6, "gosh, Andrew Sullivan is wrong about Iraq. How does he not see how wrong he is?" But the thing was, he changed. Gradually, he came to notice that the modern Republican party was doing lots of bad things. Certainly, this puts him nowhere near writers like Daniel Davies and James Fallows, who clearly saw the war was going to be a disaster, before it hap…

I ran across this the other night. Pointing you to it because it seems to offer a complementary counterpoint to your benefit of the doubt point of view. http://pando.com/2015/01/28/andrew-sullivan-is-not-the-futur...

That piece doesn't address Sullivan's change circa 2006-08. IIRC, he Began to oppose the Iraq war, and the republican party, where he had been a strong supporter previously.

I never shared Sullivan's views. I could be misremembering how much he shifted in that period, since I didn't follow him closely. But the article doesn't address those years, only earlier times. (which sound pretty bad, if the characterization is accurate)

Edit: here is a piece that comments on Ames and Sullivan. It's how I remember his later writing. No moral hero, but a man clearly aware that he made an enormous error on iraq.

http://thedailybanter.com/2013/01/andrew-sullivans-political...

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#57

Post by zabramow »

spyspy wrote: post #36
julianpye wrote: post #4

The emergence of blogging allowed individual voices outside of control of the larger media to reach their own audiences. Because of this 10 years ago noone wanted to have AOL as their walled garden. Everyone wanted to search and discover themselves. Google brought an algorithm that allowed voices to emerge, but it also spawned the SEO industry to manipulate that distribution channel and make it more difficult. Today…

Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain consistently successful is purely utopian.

Actually, I think that FB has been good for blogging. It helps get the crap off of blogging. People who can't actually maintain a blog write on FB and think of it as their blog.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#58

Post by visakanv »

misiti3780 wrote: post #32
visakanv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't make a career from the blog itself- you get headhunted because of the attention and the awareness gets you, and you get hired or solicited for all sorts of interesting, lucrative projects.

im not sure i agree - i think a lot of blogs (in the past anyways) were created with the intension of selling them - i also think there is a handful of bloggers out there that make a salary off blog traffic + book sales (www.nakedcapitalism.com / www.zerohedge.com / http://www.ritholtz.com/blog / etc.)

Right, allow me to refine my statement– tonnes of bloggers start with the intention of selling them, but few bloggers actually make it to that sort of scale.

The same thing applies to webcomics, to musicians, etc. These are the exception, not the rule. There are thousands of blogs started every day! So if you're serious about making a living from your blog, it's worth having the "big blogger" dreams, but you'll probably end up doing other things to pay the bills along the way.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#59

Post by [deleted] »

misiti3780 wrote: post #32
visakanv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't make a career from the blog itself- you get headhunted because of the attention and the awareness gets you, and you get hired or solicited for all sorts of interesting, lucrative projects.

im not sure i agree - i think a lot of blogs (in the past anyways) were created with the intension of selling them - i also think there is a handful of bloggers out there that make a salary off blog traffic + book sales (www.nakedcapitalism.com / www.zerohedge.com / http://www.ritholtz.com/blog / etc.)

[deleted]

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#60

Post by visakanv »

graeme wrote: post #40
spyspy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain consistently successful is purely utopian.

>That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google. I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial resu…

Yup! Here's the interesting, counter-intuitive thing: 99.9% of blogs can be shit, but there are literally millions of blogs.

So if you have 1,000,000 blogs, and 99.9% are shit, you still have 1,000 good blogs! If only 0.01% of blogs were good, you'd still have 100 great blogs- which is excellent for the public good.

The same long tail effects appear on things like Wikipedia, too. Wikipedia on average might have say 10-20% reliability, because 80-90% of the pages are crap. But that's because most of those pages are really obscure. The 10% that are most observed- say, pages about chemistry and physics- are updated very regularly, even quicker that science textbooks.

It seems that people are really bad at thinking about this clearly, probably because we imagine quality is a yes-or-no proposition.

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