A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on October 22nd, 2008 in This blog

Wired says I’m dead. I just checked my pulse, though, and I seem to be okay.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

I’m available on Twitter, and I have a facebook page – though I find it increasingly useless – and I keep a bunch of photos on Flickr. None of it is the equivalent of what I do here. It couldn’t possibly be.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had days where I got as many as 900 hits on this blog, and have been over 300 hits for the past couple of days. On Twitter? 68 followers.

But it’s about more than just numbers. I was blogging steady when I barely broke into double-digits on page-views. And I don’t just post here – I also blog regularly at Blue Jersey and at the Star-Ledger. I’ve blogged, in the past, at Drum Major Institute and The American Prospect, Op-Ed News, Burnt Orange Report, and NMFBIHOP, just to name a few. I’m not a household name from coast-to-coast by any means – not even in spots – but I really haven’t had that much trouble getting some amount of attention.

Yeah, people learned how to game Technorati. It’s practically useless. So is Daily Kos. But that problem is simply the problem of the internet – there are so many voices that it’s difficult to find individual voices that are worth listening to. How does Twitter – which doesn’t really have an effective search function – change that? Answer: it doesn’t. But, as it turns out, that isn’t the problem that Wired is looking at:

That said, your blog will still draw the Net’s lowest form of life: The insult commenter. Pour your heart out in a post, and some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack is sure to scribble beneath it, “Lame. Why don’t you just suck McCain’s ass.” That’s why Calacanis has retreated to a private mailing list. He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters.

Hateful people can be a problem. I have a solution here at my blog – I delete them. Over at the Star-Ledger, where I don’t run the show, I just ignore them. People are entitled to their opinions and they are free to share them appropriately in the proper forum. In that forum, I prefer to give wide latitude – the only comments that have been removed were a death-threat against me and a commenter that wanted to redirect attention to an unrelated article I’d written elsewhere. Here, it’s much more intimate, and I’m less willing to suffer fools lightly. Want to be an ass? Cool. Do it somewhere else.

Now, maybe if I had fifty jillion people stomping through here, it would reach a point of diminishing returns. I should be so lucky.

What we have here is the equivalent argument that texting will lead people to read books less. It’s idiotic. Twitter and other social networking sites can work as a tandem to blogging, but don’t confuse the two as synonymous. And if a few bloggers want to preach to their choir, then that’s fine, too.

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