Blogging on Blogging

Billmon, who was one of my favorite bloggers, has closed up shop at his site, and he wrote a pretty interesting piece for the L.A. Times about the decline and fall of blogging. Part of it sounds like the hipster in your neighborhood that stops listening to his favorite band once they "sell out" and get a hit single. This is politics, not music, however, and he does have a point about the lurch to the mainstream that occurs once anything reaches a certain critical mass:

The media's infatuation has a distinct odor of the deathbed about it — not for the blogosphere, which has a commercially bright future, but for the idea of blogging as a grass-roots challenge to the increasingly sanitized "content" peddled by the Time Warner-Capital Cities-Disney-General Electric-Viacom-Tribune media oligopoly.

When I learned that Wonkette is a contracted blog owned by a corporate entity, I was definitely taken aback. It reminds me of an advertising executive trying to look inconspicuous at the rock club, surreptitiously straining to figure out what the cool people wear. There's a mission creep that can happen.

However, that only looks at a small part of the blogosphere. It completely ignores the blogs like, well, this one, which has a small audience but is beholden to no one, and can express itself in any way it chooses. Yes, I realize I made it sounds like the blog is its own author. I mean me, of course. When I get appreciative emails (there have been a few) or comments or things like that, I'm amazed at what this technology allows. Also, sticky sites like Daily Kos offer an opportunity to give a voice to the voiceless. I've managed to reach the front page of Kos a few times, and I'm stunned to see my sig up on one of the most popular blogs out there.

I think the hysteria over Billmon's piece online is largely misplaced flattery ("Look, the L.A. Times is talking about ME!!!), but blogging is clearly here to stay, and in a good way. It's not the exclusive property of the journalist class, and most of the time (IMO) a blog that gets 10 unique visitors a day is far more insightful than one that gets 100,000. In many ways, the blog is merely what citizens did in town halls and public squares for centuries, before the computer and the television sent us all inside with the doors locked. There certainly is a lot more democracy going on in this democracy than there was 4 years ago, and that can only be a positive.