Six page article in the New York Times - Blogs to Riches.

It is quite geek, celebrity and US focused, but it takes an interesting look at the reality that those that got into blogging early are the ones that are making the money. And a lot of bloggers went into this medium for the money. This article looks at homeostasis and the odds of making a dent let alone that money you’d like to make. Many bloggers who have been around for awhile are joining networks, (what I call blog malls) but I wonder if that area is getting saturated. Most of the top 100 bloggers can easily put in 80 hour weeks.

What’s more, a blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day—hell, every few minutes—even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience. The A-listers cannot rest on their laurels. Federated Media owner John Battelle recently published a book on Google, and while on the book tour, he neglected his own well-trafficked blog (No. 81 on Technorati’s rankings) for several days. “And suddenly I was getting all these e-mails going, ‘If you don’t get your shit together, I’m out of here,’ ” he recalls. He stayed up late that night frantically adding posts. “If you start sucking,” he says, “it’s through.”

This Financial Times article on blogging - Time for The Last Post is not nearly as kind or as optimistic. Cynical, acerbic, some relevant points are made, not the least of which is the belief of some US bloggers that thought they could replace or usurp traditional media overhyping. Hugh Hewitt and Pajamas Media are just two of the examples of enthusiasm and overestimating used. 

The present round of chiselling may feel exciting and radically new - but blogging in the US is not reflective of the kind of deep social and political change that lay behind the alternative press in the 1960s. Instead, its dependency on old media for its material brings to mind Swift’s fleas sucking upon other fleas “ad infinitum”: somewhere there has to be a host for feeding to begin. That blogs will one day rule the media world is a triumph of optimism over parasitism.

Again this article is very New York, very inside, geeks, celebrity and niche networks, none of which I confess I’ve read. One point well made is that the US market is not the rest of the world.

In authoritarian societies like Syria or China, it’s the reverse - people lack independent information and may question the imposed hierarchy. In fact, as Nasrin Alavi notes in her recent book, We are Iran, blogging is creating an information revolution where the Iranian regime has been stunningly successful at shutting down newspapers (41 over the past decade). “Thanks to the anonymity and freedom of weblogs, Iranians are at last speaking up and discussing issues that have never been publicly aired in the national media before,” Alavi wrote in the FT magazine last November. “The head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Shahroudi, recently described the internet as a ‘Trojan horse carrying enemy soldiers in its belly’. He’s right. The Iranian blogosphere pulses with opposition to the Islamic revolution.”

 

Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed societies; but for those in the west trying to blog their way into viable businesses, the economics are daunting.

 

The inherent problem with blogging is that your brand resides in individuals. If they are fabulous writers, someone is likely to lure them away to a better salary and the opportunity for more meaningful work; if the writer tires and burns out, the brand may go down in flames with them.

Bloggers are committed, intense and the reality as, as big as their world seems to be according to the Pew Research people 62 percent of the US computer owning or access population don’t read blogs. So the food fights in the blogosphere get locked into their own circles.

There is an article up at Spero News about a three/four day blog swarm that targeted a church website.  I posted about the St. James site here at BDBO. This Spero News article is a background story about the people in the Pennsylvania church that were misjudged and hurt.