Thursday, July 2, 2009

Blogging: A History Lesson

11D offers a very well-written history lesson on blogging as she enters her sixth year in the blogosphere. I can attest to the feeling of burn-out and the time spent, not because I've been busy the past month, but because of the previous year I spent with Zach at RotoNomics, blogging about fantasy baseball. It was a rewarding experience, to be sure, but required a fantastic daily time commitment and provided little external reward.

She also offers some advice on how to make it in the modern blogosphere: "Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you'll get a following."

I can only hope to live up to that. So far, this has been an experiment in trying to blog again, only with a much broader framework than "daily fantasy baseball updates and analysis." I'm still trying to find my focus.

In a related post on the future of the blogosphere, Tyler asks how you can combine blogs and Twitter to make your daily intake of information more efficient.

(Wanted to leave this as a comment to your post, Josh, but it was a little too long. Sorry)

3 comments:

Josh Knox said...

Excellent quote from Ezra Klein on the development of the blogosphere:

"The blogosphere grew up and it got a job, or, to be more specific, lots of jobs. That made it less fun, but, like a frat house legend who now goes to work every morning, probably more useful to society."

A clear mission could get us a following, but maybe we're not ready for that.

Pete Abbate said...

Haha that's a fantastic quote! And I don't think we are close to being ready for that, but in the long run writing for someone other than me will make your life more interesting (or at least that was true for RotoNomics).

Pete Abbate said...

More on the development of the blogosphere. Tyler offers more perspective on blogging in CYOE, as well.

This might be worth a new post in the future - I think the direction of the blogosphere, especially in the context of newspapers failing, magazines changing their focus, the Kindle growing daily - is actually a very interesting topic.

Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~Fredrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty