White Rabbit Night

Gah, I'm late. Been trying to polish off the Nightfall Updates in the queue because, really, I'm done with things and I'd like to get them out of the way and get on with my life. Since I'm playing something else I'd like to be talking about and all. But, it's getting late and I'd like to get my nightly Guild Warring in so it'll have to wait at least a day longer. There's some big news in the offing there, too, although I'm going to play it close to the vest until the deal's closed and all.

Anyhow, check out this article and MyDD. It's about the progressive blogosphere but I think it can be applied more broadly to the entire blogscape. There's not as much blue water as there used to be so it's much more difficult to start out and be successful, in the sense of having a lot of pageviews, links, readers, and so on, than it used to be in a lot of areas. That's, you know, not surprising or anything and this market's nowhere near mature, if you ask me (A progressive blog about politics on the other hand....well, you'd really have to come up with a good hook.).

But there are a few things I'll note. First: "Eschaton, is one of the last, top-tier, solo-content provider independent blogs around. Atrios has somehow managed to put up twelve posts a day, every day, for five years. A superhuman effort few can match." Which, wow. 12 posts a day is, indeed, epic. I thought I was doing good averaging around four but that's just out of the park (Granted, a lot of Atrios's posts are short and sweet. While I, you know, apparently get paid by the letter. But, trust me, even making twelve small posts a day is harder than it looks - Atrios's skill is in making it look easy.).

Second: "Dailykos: The ultimate community blog, with 120,000 registered users and nearly a dozen regular front-page writers. It produces over 500,000 new words of content every day, on virtually every topic in politics, and has attracted writing from virtually the entire Democratic leadership." 500k words a day is stunning. Back in the NaNo we approximated 50k words to be around 175 pages (And the 80k or so of us involved were really hoping to break a billion words combined over not two days but a month. Next year, next year.). So the Kos is kicking out more than a thousand pages of reading material in a single day. Just amazingly beautiful. It's like Gutenberg's Nightmare time a thousand. From just one, popular yet niche site. Most of it is tripe, sure, but, well, the next time I start thinking the only lasting contribution our civilization is making starts with Cops and ends with American Idol, I'll know different.

Outlook: I love this blogging thing.