Garret Vreeland’s wonderful blog, dangerousmeta! is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Garret usually keeps it brief, but his post on spending 10 years at the helm of a blog is worth reading in full. Congratulations, old man!
A lot of people are wondering about the relevance of RSS readers these days. These days, there are lots of ways to maintain a healthy flow of inbound information. Twitter is perhaps the hottest, but there are plenty of other options as well. And so a lot of people are wondering about the old standby — subscribing to feeds in an RSS reader. Read Write Web had a post this week, RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline. Dave Winer has taken the time to point out (again) that the river of news model is right, and the email client model is wrong.
And then this morning, I read the following in the Patrick Appel interview that I linked to in my previous post:
I get up around 8 am, check Memeorandum, and skim new items in my RSS reader until about 10 am. As I’m reading, I open around fifty posts in tabs for closer inspection. I then read through those tabs, delete most of them, and draft the best. According to Google Reader, I have 1,086 blogs in my RSS reader and have read 16,070 posts in the last 30 days. This is down from a high of about 32,000 posts during the height of the election.
If you’re a serious consumer of information from a wide variety of sites, there’s still no substitute for subscribing to feeds in an RSS reader. Twitter is great, but it’s not the same. And I think that’s particularly true if you’re a blogger. If you’re just linking to the stuff that people are all talking about on Twitter or that floats to the top of Hacker News, you may as well give up on your blog, as far as I’m concerned. Everybody already sees that stuff. You have to dig deeper to offer more interesting information, and an RSS reader is the best tool you can use for that purpose.
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen interviews Patrick Appel, one of the “underbloggers” at Andrew Sullivan’s blog. First of all, if you have an inferiority complex about your own blog when you read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, this interview will make you feel a lot better. Andrew Sullivan actually has three writers working on it full time — more than full time, really. Appel says he works on the site 10-14 hours a day.
There’s a ton of other great stuff, too, though. Here’s how Appel decides what’s worth linking to:
A few of the questions I ask myself when pondering whether to link to a post containing political opinion: is the writer intellectually honest? Is the post timely? Is the writer an expert on the subject? Is the perspective new and original? Would I want someone else to bring this post to my attention? Does this post help me better understand the news of the day? Does the post help me better understand a political, economic, scientific or philosophical concept? Is is accessible and well written? Does it help me understand an ideological viewpoint?
It’s a really interesting look at how blogs work these days at the largest scale. If you like the interview, you might also be interested in Sullivan’s own explanation of how his blog works.
In a post about how economists often separate their personal beliefs and professional work, Tyler Cowen describes bloggers like this:
In many ways the core of blogging is a willingness to apply what you know to every problem you encounter, and see how good a job you can do of it in a more or less integrated fashion.
That’s pretty much a perfect explanation of what my goal is for this blog. I break down the problems I encounter in terms of the things I already know and believe. I make mistakes and try to learn from them. There are a lot of blogs that don’t fit this model, but it certainly describes many of the blogs I enjoy most.
I thought baseball writer Rany Jazayerli’s description of blogging versus journalism was interesting:
If you define a “blogger” as someone who delivers opinionated commentary over the internet from an informed but access-free perspective, then I’ve been a blogger since the founding of Baseball Prospectus over 13 years ago, which is to say for longer since the word “blogger” has existed. The part about “access-free” is critical, because that really is they lynchpin of the whole blogger/journalist dichotomy. Joe Posnanski has one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, but he’s not a blogger: he’s a journalist with a blog.
For all the criticisms that the mainstream media heap upon the blogosphere, most of them are just variations on a single theme: that bloggers neither have nor need access to the subjects they are covering, and because they don’t have access, they also don’t have accountability. It’s a simple fact of human nature that it’s a lot harder to criticize someone when you have to see them face-to-face on a regular basis.
He goes on to explain why this is one of the most compelling features of blogs. Certainly lack of access is one of the hallmarks of this blog.
I’ve finished Scott Rosenberg’s history of blogging, Say Everything, and wanted to finish writing up my thoughts. The other day I wrote about the first half, now I’m adding my impression on the whole thing.
As I mentioned in the earlier post, Scott does a truly outstanding job of capturing the essence of events as they occurred. The toughest job for a historian or journalist is making the events recognizable to those who observed them closely, and Scott succeeds admirably on that front.
There are also pieces of analysis in the book that really impressed me. There’s a discussion of sincerity and authenticity that I found illuminating. I never really considered the differences between the two, but they are important and meaningful. I’d classify this blog as a “sincere” blog, but not an “authentic” one, by Scott’s definition.
He draws a distinction between “professional” bloggers and “traditional” bloggers that never occurred to me but that defines things perfectly — the pros write about what they think will interest their audience. The traditionalists write about what interests them. The difference is profound. I read all sorts of amateur blogs but very few professional ones. And what’s interesting to me is that the line is not whether the author gets paid or not — it’s the sensibility they bring to their work.
I also want to note that Scott incorporates quotations from blogs throughout the book, and the quotes are very well selected. The quotations not only underscore the points he’s trying to make, but are also almost always important in their own right. There are very few quotations from blogs in the book that were new to me.
This is a book about blogs that any blogger would enjoy reading. It’d also be great for people who have never gotten what blogging is all about. It’s really a fine book.
I’ve plowed into Scott Rosenberg’s new history of blogging, Say Everything and finished the first half of the book today. It’s pretty clear to me that this book will be seen one day as incredibly important. This is the first history book I’ve ever read (and could very well be the last) that describes events that I observed very closely. Scott does a great job of filling in the backstories for those events. Nothing in the book rings patently false or wrong to me, and that’s the highest compliment I can pay.
A few random impressions from the first few chapters:
A few things I was sad to see go unmentioned:
As I’m sure you already know, I’ve created the rc3dotorg Twitter account so that I can let people on Twitter know when I’ve published something. One unfortunate side effect has been that it has complicated my workflow when I write new posts.
Normally I just compose the post in MarsEdit and hit the publish button. I’m sure the process could be greatly simplified, but for two things that complicate the process. The first is that I like to use short URLs that I furnish myself, and the second is that I like to compose the tweets by hand.
I publish this blog using WordPress, and I use the le petite url plugin to create short links. Most of the time I publish updates to Twitter using Tweetie.
So here’s my workflow these days:
The main inconvenience is opening WordPress in the browser once I’ve already gone to the trouble to write the post somewhere else. What I need is a tool that will allow me to access the internally generated short URL and compose a Tweet from MarsEdit that can be published whenever the blog post itself is published.
It’s looking like I’m going to need to write my own WordPress plugin to do exactly what I want. There are a ton of Twitter plugins, I think I’ll just have to find the right one and adapt it to my needs.
More later.
Tyler Cowen on bloggers:
I have never once met a person whose blog I like and then been disappointed. Never.
I wonder if the converse is true as well. Would you like a person if you don’t like their blog?
Scott Rosenberg takes a look at Mark Penn’s crazy numbers in his article on professional blogging.
Needless to say, his assertion that 2 million Americans are being paid for writing online don’t hold up.
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