At Outside the Beltway today, James Joyner has an excellent post on blogging that I highly recommend to all of you, bloggers and non-bloggers alike.
Responding to the concerns and frustrations of fellow bloggers Stephen Bainbridge and Steven Taylor, Joyner addresses “the day-to-day grind of maintaining a blog of political commentary”. A major problem is that “the increasing dominance of blogs that are the Internet equivalent of talk radio, with their predictable hyper-partisanship, has turned many people off”. Yet:
To me, the key is deciding what you want your blog to be (or, at least aspire to be) and then accepting the consequences. Being thoughtful and treating opposing viewpoints seriously will get you readers on both sides of the aisle but it will all but preclude building a rabid following a’la Daily Kos or Power Line. There’s simply a much larger audience of people who want to be pandered to and fed a constant message of “Yay, us!” and “Boo, them!” That’s true in talk radio and it’s increasingly true on the blogs.
I agree. The competition, the quest for traffic and attention, can be frustrating and not a little disheartening. Many bloggers simply give up. But there is surely room for many different voices in the blogosphere, and I think it does come down to knowing who you are, what your strengths and interests are as a blogger, and what you would like to contribute to our online community of bloggers and blog-readers.
In this sense, I see my own blog, The Reaction, as a work-in-progress. I have several different contributors, co-bloggers and guest bloggers from all over North America (and one in the U.K.), and we write on all sorts of different topics — mostly American politics, but also international politics, the arts, entertainment, sports, and so on. We are certainly liberal in our politics, but I’d like to think we know who we are and that we contribute something of interest to the blogosphere.
And this is why I love The Moderate Voice and why it’s such a great pleasure to be a co-blogger here. I’m sure all of us here have our frustrations, but — speaking for myself, if not for Joe and my fellow co-bloggers (I’ll let them speak for themselves) — I do see TMV as a work-in-progress, too, where different voices from around the world (and we are truly international) write on different topics (and we are truly diverse in what we write about) without succumbing to repetition and blandness. Sure, we can be partisan at times (many of you have surely noticed my own partisanship, and many of you many not much care for my views at all) — or at least politically critical — but I trust that we aren’t predictable. Personally, I always look forward to coming on here and seeing what’s new from Joe and the other co-bloggers. There may not always be agreement, but I would contend that there’s always respect.
Anyway, go check out Joyner’s post. If you’re a blogger, there’s a lot to think about in terms of why you blog and how you blog. Even if you’re not — and I apologize for writing what seems to be a sort of inside-blogging post — I’d be interested to know what attracts you to blogs, what you look for in blogs, and what you think we bloggers could do differently.