What's Next for the Blogosphere?

How much time do you put into your blogging?

I blog most of the day, depending on what's going. If it's a workday, I'll post in the morning before lectures. Read the newspapers at break, and then write something at lunch. Then I'll blog in the late afternoon and evening. In the summer, I can organize my activities around blogging. Today I'll post a couple of more times this morning, then I'll be out most of the afternoon for my family's 4th of July party. Then more tonight.

I'm thinking of this while reading Laura McKenna's piece, "The Blogosphere 2.0."

Many of the top bloggers have been absorbed into some other professional enterprise or are burnt. It's a lot of work to blog. Most bloggers, and not just the A-listers, spend 3-5 hours every day blogging. That's hard to maintain, especially since there is no money in this. They used that time to not only write their posts and monitor their comment sections, but to read and foster other bloggers. Blogging survived based on the goodwill and generosity of others. It's probably no coincidence that every blogger that I've met face-to-face is an extraordinarily nice person. But it's hard to volunteer that much time over a long period of time. The spouses tend to get annoyed.

Make sure you read the whole thing.

McKenna seems to be burned out herself, or at least she's not hip to some new trends in blogging (I'd called them elite partisan network effects). Rick Moran wrote about changing norms and practices last fall at Pajamas Media, "Blogs and the 2008 Election." Moran's main point is that political blogging is the new muckraking, with attacks and counterattacks consuming the time of most partisan bloggers:

While the nation is going through an economic crisis, trying to decide the best course of action in Iraq, and wrestling with serious questions of war, peace, and financial security, blogs as a whole are concerned with either promoting or knocking down the latest smear from their opponents. Or, even worse, trivializing the utterances of both candidates so that the elections seems more about the best way to make the opposition look bad by blowing a statement out of all sensible proportion while, at the same time, accusing the candidate of all manner of hair raising-perfidy.

Perhaps it is time to pause and ask “Is this the best blogs can do?”

I think the more appropriate question is "how can we do it better"?

Really, blogs aren't on the sidelines anymore, obviously; and hence they're by no means passé. The Obama administration plants Huffington Post bloggers at its faux town hall meetings. And the president reads top leftists bloggers to get a clue of what's happening politically. Conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds serve as the portal for the right wing opposition, in the tea party movement, for example.

So I hardly find much significance to this idea of the lost "glory days" of blogging (note how McKenna's "glory days" were when the Democrats were out of power).

It takes a lot of work to build a readership and reputation, as I wrote about in "How to Become a Successful Conservative Blogger." I'd warn folks not to get their expecations too high. But I think the key is to build alliances and networks. Share a lot of links and promote others in your work. Some days will be slow, and you will "burn out" a bit. But blogging will continue to be a central means of political communication in the new era of Facebook, Twitter, and the "next big thing."