A year ago today I started as a solo blogger. Unlike my previous group blog Catallaxy I’m not being written up in books about the media, but I do get media enquiries and writing requests based on blog posts.

Some of them are very unexpected – I would never have anticipated being asked to debate the door policy of a gay bar with an American philosopher of sex in a British philosophy magazine, but that’s where this post seems to have led (it should appear sometime in the next month).

And in contrast to the general impression that the inhibition-dropping nature of the blogosphere makes it a polarising place, my criticisms of people sometimes lead to positive and thoughtful responses, both in comments and in person. I hope it is because I (mostly…) stick to the spirit of my comments policy and keep my posts calm and polite. (Andrew Leigh seems to think so, anyway).

Luckily almost all commenters have also kept to the civility rules, and I think the comments thread is much better for it. There have been some good debates in comments threads, and from my perspective plenty of useful additional information, corrections, suggestions, and criticisms among the 5,354 comments so far. Our lurkers offer more of the same in email, by phone and in person. So thanks.
Continue reading “My blog is one today” →

A few days ago my excellent blog host, Jacques Chester, asked if I was prepared to be a guinea pig for blog text advertising. Functions like Google’s AdSense must be one of the few blogging things he hasn’ t tried.

I wasn’t keen on the idea, but said I would see what other people thought. My case against:

* Though it might seem strange given how boring the appearance of my old blog was, now that I have one that looks nice I have an aesthetic objection to the added clutter of ads. At least in Catallaxy’s case the ads are also pushing down the screen more relevant things such as the subject areas and the blogroll.

* I don’t really believe that the ads would be of any interest to my readers – partly due to flaws in Google’s technology. As I write, Catallaxy is promoting a Bob Dylan concert in Paris, Jeep Cherokees, and home sales in the Victorian town of Cherokee. The Dylan ad was the result of this post on Dylan meeting the Pope; the Cherokee ads were triggered by this post of Jason’s on the Native American Cherokees. Clearly this system is not going to put the human judgment found in advertising agencies out of business just yet. Parkos’s comments are baffling enough without readers having to wonder over the ads as well.

* Advertising is necessary to keep most forms of media free or cheap to consumers, but that doesn’t apply to blogs nearly as much, and not at all to this blog. The upkeep costs are minimal. Jacques won’t even take up my offer to cover the money that is being spent.

* Blogging is a hobby, and I would really rather not mix hobbies and commerce.

As Jacques would still like to know more about blog advertising, perhaps a commenter with experience of it can fill him in?

According to a media survey, blogs are now registering as a source of news, with 2% of people turning first to blogs for news of events in Australia, after scoring a ‘*’ last year. But TV (42%) and radio (21%) still dominate, reflecting their superior news gathering and delivery capacities. Slightly more people – 3% – turn to blogs for ‘political background’. I thought blogs might have done better on this question; this is one area in which I think some blogs do quite well.

But blogs have found their niche in providing ‘views and opinions of people like me’, with 7% of people turning first to blogs to have their prejudices reinforced. Talkback radio and ‘newspapers/magazines’ (an annoying blurring of quite different forms of media) also do better on this count than on providing ‘political background’. That this is blogs’ strength is not suprising. With low set-up and running costs, blogs can target niche viewpoints (such as classical liberalism:)) more effectively than media that require large audiences to be economically viable. Overall, though, these figures remind us that blogs have very limited capacity to influence how the public sees the world. Our audience is mostly people who agree with us already.

Tim Dunlop, of the leftish blog Road to Surfdom, is a few days into his News Ltd Blogocracy gig. Generally, newspaper attempts to run blogs haven’t been that successful. Maybe that’s why they have brought in a successful blogger, rather than trying to repackage journalists as bloggers.

But perhaps blogs haven’t worked on newspapers because the differences between them are too great. The most successful news-driven blogs – like Lavartus Prodeo on the left or Tim Blair on the right – are to me much closer to talkback radio than to newspapers or magazines. Both news-blogs and talkback are heavily reliant on print media for their stories, but add opinion – often of a strongly held and predictable kind from the blogger/presenter – and the opportunity for the general public to have their usually only slightly mediated say.

Personally, neither talkback nor the news-blogs do much for me. I want to learn new things, not read things I know already or could easily guess. I think Lavartus Prodeo isn’t nearly as good as it was when it was Mark Bahnisch’s thoughtful solo blog. Though there is still the occasional reflective and informative post, most of it is just the day’s soft-left talking points. Yet clearly this is a winning formula, as the site visit and page view statistics Mark sends around show.

The issue the newspapers are working on is whether the two forms of media can be combined. Though most newspapers have political leanings, all the main daily papers in Australia try to provide some balance and quality control (within the constraints of limited expertise and short deadlines). By contrast, the successful blogs, like successful talkback shows, thrive on being opinionated, with the quality control mostly after rather than before publication, via critical comments and calls.

Are newspapers taking risks with their reputations in adopting the blog format? I think there is some danger that the newspapers’ already fragile credibility could be undermined further by blogs which lack fact-checking or balance. But perhaps the more likely outcome is that the newspaper blogs won’t generate enough traffic to justify their existence, as they don’t provide the kind of content people who go to newspaper websites are trying to find.

Catallaxy is my biggest source of referrals, so I presume we have quite a few overlapping readers who will have noticed that it has been down, with server problems apparently. It’s now back in very primitive form, without any substantive posts yet or its archive (I hope that is recovered – my posts here would be even longer than they are if I could not link back to old posts that support elements of my argument). But Tom seems hopeful that things will be back to normal soon.

Update: There are now a few substantive posts to check out.

My solo blog is one month old today. I’m reasonably happy with the way it’s going – I’ve enjoyed writing it, there have been some excellent comments, nobody has breached the comments policy (though one person came close), it has prompted some discussion at other blogs, and I have been able to use posts in the media. The daily page views could be higher – averaging 247 a day since I started, though the navel-gazing of the last few days seems to have produced a bit of a surge. But it’s early days yet, and with a Technorati rank of 173,201 I’m ahead of about 56.6 million of the other blogs they claim to be monitoring.

But one thing I don’t like is the look of the blog, which is boring, and the fact that I can’t get the comments sidebar to work. If anyone can recommend someone to redesign it for a reasonable price I’m interested in hearing suggestions. I can be contacted via andrew AT andrewnorton.info