What To Write About

Joe Gandelman, sitting in for Dean Esmay, wrote a piece the other day that I've been thinking a lot about lately.

The past six weeks, since the election, have seen a lot of blogs and bloggers taking a deep breath and going "well...what now?"

I know that now many blogs find their hits diminishing as compared with election week highs. record blog readerships overall, and then a drop afterwards (people burned out by reading political commentary or just needing a break from the election). But the general trend for a good number of blogs (such as Dean's World and my own The Moderate Voice, which seems to be enjoying moderate steady readership with an increasingly loyal group of readers from both parties) remains steady overall growth.

Very true. On Shot In The Dark, traffic is down about a third from its October, pre-election rates - but still way ahead of the summe, and slowly growing again. Put another way - if you'd told me last April that I'd be whining about getting 1,800 visitors a day, I'd have thought you were crazy.

But not everyone's seen it that way:

What's amazing as we head into this post-election era is the number of blogs that have simply been abandoned. I have an extensive blogroll on my blog which I personally use all the time. I have had to remove at least four blogs in recent weeks because they were still dated early November. And this week I'll go through the whole blogroll and remove some more. It's a pity because these people had SOMETHING TO SAY that probably could be said after the election, too — and I'm talking about people in the right and on the left, not just one ideology.

Indeed, there had been a phrase before the election about blogs "likely to be around after the election" and I used to dismiss it, figuring people wouldn't let the end of the election end their ability to use this incredible new communication form which allows people to write without an editor's intervention or a corporate publisher's forum. But I was wrong.

Call me more cynical than Joe - it's reasonable - but I figured we'd see a big shakeout. The last six months before the election felt, in some ways, like working in the dotcom world in 1998; everyone wanted to be there; not everyone knew why they wanted to be there, but they could sense something going on, and they wanted a piece of it - whatever "it" was.

"It" was only partly the election, I think. In some ways, being among other bloggers in the weeks before the election felt like wandering the streets of downtown Minneapolis the nights the Twins won the '87 and '91 World Series. We were hordes of strangers, united by a common passion, and for a moment everyone was everyone's best friend. We bought rounds for people we'd never seen; we hugged women we'd never have approached a day earlier or a day later, and they hugged back rather than calling the cops.

Blogger get-togethers weren't quite that effusive - but the underlying feeling was there. And now comes the feeling we got in November of '87 and November of '91 - when the snow falls, the confetti's swept up, and life resumes its regular mundanity.

Or does it? Gandelman:

What does it mean in the post-election world? Well, with more than a million weblogs, it means that each person has to make their own decision about what they want to write about what other want to read. This likely means more diverse subjects...which is not a bad idea. The polarized, partisan nature of the blogosphere probably won't change, although it will be muted somewhat until major battles emerge (and return full force during mid-term elections).

I don't know.

This is just a breathing spell, I think, just like the little mini-doldrum after the '02 election (which few people noticed, because they were either in the first rush of excitement over starting their blogs, or hadn't heard of them yet).

But things will pick up. We have an unending - indeed, possibly a brewing - war in the local media, with the PiPress maybe breaking out of the liberal ghetto and getting some intellectual cojones, with a lot of bloggers emboldened by the example of Powerline and some of our other local blogs out sniffing at the heels of big media, big education, big business for their own "Rathergate", and, for all I know, dozens of people trying to write cross-gender literature experiments/softcore porn blogs to see if they can out-do Layne. And of course, we're going to have an amazing political season in '06, and it's going to start a lot sooner than you think.

Things are going to get more interesting; if you're one of the horde of new bloggers that's come up in the past year or so, the key is to just keep writing. It becomes its own reward after a while, even if you never land that first Instalanche, and the better you get, the more likely that 'lanche is going to be.

So hang in there.

Posted by Mitch at December 20, 2004 05:42 PM | TrackBack