Bloggasm

If I were to list my top 10 blogging pet peeves, bloggers that respond to and criticize other online writers without linking to them would be at the top of the list. There are few things that are more childish and inexcusable in the blogosphere.

This tends to happen most often in political blogs. For instance, in 2006 conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote a hit piece accusing the NY Times of needlessly endangering the life of Donald Rumsfeld by publishing pictures of his house. It wasn’t long before several bloggers tore her argument to shreds by showing that just about everything she had asserted was demonstratively false. At one point it even came to light that the NY Times photographer had received permission from Rumsfeld for taking the photo. Eventually, Malkin was pressured to write a follow-up post so that she could respond to her critics.

The result? A post that went to every length to never link to the blogs that destroyed her arguments. Instead, she sets up strawman after strawman and then knocks them down with a back-sliding flourish of intellectual dishonesty, a whirlwind of arm thrashing and punches in the dark.

The wonderful thing about the internet is that it’s easy to provide context. The mainstream media is often criticized for providing out-of-context sound-bites. But when I’m criticizing an article, say, in the New York Times, I have the benefit of not only providing choice quote soundbites, but also linking to the article so that skeptical readers can read it in full. I can have my cake and eat it too.

Which brings me to a recent email exchange I had with a writer for the National Review.

I had been skimming through its Media Blog when I came across a post titled “Metrics for Success” In the post, Kevin D. Williamson provides a throw-away criticism of an article on LewRockwell.com.

As you can probably predict, Williamson criticized the article without ever linking to it, an action that annoyed me enough that I shot him an email:

Kevin,

I’m curious; you wrote about an article on leerockwell.com but didn’t link to it. Why? Don’t you think that if a blogger is critical of an article that appears online, that he should link to it so that his readers can read it in its entirety if they want to weigh the merits of his criticism?

–Simon

His flip response that arrived a few minutes later was entirely predictable:

I don’t always link to everything I mention, especially if I don’t think the item worth reading. I believe everybody knows that they can find lewrockwell.com articles at lewrockwell.com, if they are so inclined.

Thanks for writing.

Yours,
Kevin

To which I responded:

Somehow I think that if the tables were turned and another blogger started criticizing one of your posts by cherry-picking quotes from it and not linking to it you would be quite annoyed.

And sure, I could criticize something at nytimes.com and assume that if a reader really wanted to he could visit the website and do an archive search, but those assumptions are silly considering I can take the five extra seconds to link to it.

You say that it’s not an item worth reading, and yet it’s an item worth responding to?

–simon

You see, Williamson. Even though your blog post violated one of my biggest pet peeves — and would therefore qualify as a post “not worth reading,” as you put it — I still linked to it anyway. You know why? Because I have respect for my readers and allow them to read your post in full to get context.

Given that you’re writing for a “media blog,” I shouldn’t have to give you lessons in Blogging 101.

It has long been understood that the largest liberal blogs have generally produced more web traffic than the largest conservative blogs. But I have noticed a general trend over the past few months that I didn’t want to write about until the end of the year. After surveying the traffic stats of many major political blogs, I found that web traffic for several major liberal blogs either declined sharply or stayed the same while major conservative blogs saw a sharp increase in traffic.

For consistency, I only included blogs that used the Sitemeter web traffic measurer. For each blog, I added up the web visits (sometimes referred to as unique visitors, though this term can be misleading) of the first six months and the next six months. After tallying up these figures I compared them to see if the blog’s readership increased or decreased. With liberal blogs, I consistently saw decreases, some of which were quite sharp. For the conservative blogs, I saw a significant increase in the number of visits.

Now, it’s very difficult to make conclusions based on these findings. It could be that the liberal blogosphere is experiencing a Long Tail effect, meaning that readers of liberal blogs are spreading out over a larger range of websites. And though liberal blogs showed a sharp decline in web visits during 2007, this isn’t to say that their overall visits didn’t increase compared to 2006 — it’s hard to say, since Site Meter only tracks the previous 13 months.

Either way, it is certainly an interesting trend. Below you’ll see my findings, first with major liberal blogs and then major conservative blogs.

LIBERAL BLOGS

Daily Kos:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 87,373,521
Total visits for second half of 2007: 86,994,331
A decrease of 379,190, or .4%

Crooks and Liars:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 29,670,556
Total visits for second half of 2007: 29,296,242
A decrease of 374,314, or 1%

Eschaton/Atrios

Total visits for first half of 2007: 18,376,378
Total visits for second half of 2007: 15,025,963
A decrease of 3,350,415, or 18%

Fire Dog Lake:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 13,558,479
Total visits for second half of 2007: 9,940,658
A decrease of 3,617,821, or 27%

Hullabaloo/Digby:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 4,807,916
Total visits for second half of 2007: 4,557,295
A decrease of 250,621, or 5%

CONSERVATIVE BLOGS

Instapundit:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 31,950,398
Total visits for second half of 2007: 36,729,803
An increase of 4,779,405, or 15%

Michelle Malkin:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 18,734,829
Total visits for second half of 2007: 24,435,479
An increase of 5,700,650, or 30%

Hot Air:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 18,272,454
Total visits for second half of 2007: 24,566,481
An increase of 6,294,027, or 34%

Red State:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 4,276,010
Total visits for second half of 2007: 4,980,036
An increase of 704,026, or 16%

Right Wing News:

Total visits for first half of 2007: 1,764,729
Total visits for second half of 2007: 1,783,724
An increase of 18,995, or 1%

Some assorted links for your perusal:

1. Gawker Media’s founder decides he doesn’t need no stinkin’ bloggers, he’ll edit and manage the Gawker blog himself.

2. If you’re reading this, this is what your facebook news feed will look like in 30 years.

3. Yet another article about newspapers trying to adapt to the online world. Like just about every other article of its kind, it fails to acknowledge that though news rooms are shrinking, the number of full-time bloggers is growing. At an equal rate? Who knows? But it certainly would paint a better picture of the journalism industry if we’d at least give it some cursory thought.

Don’s 25-year career as an entrepreneur, executive, investment manager and commentator has been built around his passion for the application of technology and innovation to the challenge of investing.

Prior to founding Trend Macrolytics with David Gitlitz, Don was Vice Chairman and co-Chief Investment Officer of Barclays Global Investors, where he worked with the world’s largest institutional investors to create innovative indexing and quantitative investment management strategies.

After Barclays, Don was CEO and co-founder of MetaMarkets.com, and manager of the pathbreaking OpenFund — the world’s first mutual fund to disclose all its holdings and trading activity in real-time on the Internet.

Don was the inventor of the POSIT ECN, and founder of Investment Technology Group at Jefferies & Company. He has been a hedge fund manager and an options market maker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Pacific Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange.

Don runs a web-log based on his forthcoming book, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid — in which he examines the obstacles to wealth creation by ordinary people. He is the author of Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide, and editor of Portfolio Insurance: The Guide to Dynamic Hedging, both published by Wiley & Company.

Don’s columns are published weekly on SmartMoney.com and he contributes frequently to National Review Online, where he writes the Krugman Truth Squad column. He appears regularly on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company” and on Bloomberg TV, CNN and Fox News. He was formerly a columnist for TheStreet.com and Business 2.0. His commentaries have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Pensions & Investments, the American Spectator, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Detroit News.

Simon Owens: Do you think that political blogs are able to create an effective checks and balance on the Mainstream Media? Do they tend to ignore bloggers when they point out mistakes in their reporting?

Don Luskin: The MSM is very defensive of its credibility, and is loathe to point out serious errors no matter who points them out. It’s all the worse when upstart media competitors like bloggers point out the errors.

Simon Owens: Many mainstream journalists grow frustrated with bloggers because there doesn’t seem to be much of a filtration system to their reporting. Do you think there’s an validity to this frustration?

Don Luskin: Yes and no. It’s true that blogs are unfiltered. But editorial filters are themselves unfiltered. You are always reading words that are the product of somebody’s judgment. Who filters the filter? At least with blogs there are no illusions. You aren’t told there is some wise editor who somehow knows that only truth will get published.

Simon Owens: Conservative political bloggers have grown furious with the New York Times for its recent set of leaks, yet at the same time one of the most important things about democratic governments is that they must remain as transparent as humanly possible. When is it ok to publish a leak and when should newspapers hold back?

Don Luskin: It surprises me that there aren’t more objections to the leaks themselves, but rather to the fact that the leaked content gets published. If government can’t keep its own secrets, whose fault is that really? From the standpoint of a media outlet, if some government official is telling you a story, how can you think the government doesn’t want you to publish it? You are between a rock and a hard place if one government official tells you the information and another begs you not to publish it, as appears to be the case with the SWIFT surveillance.

Simon Owens: You often refer to the New York Times as the “elite.” What do you think causes this elitist atmosphere in journalism?

Don Luskin: It is literally a cultural elite, with its members drawn from filtration processes including Ivy League schools, best families, and so on. It is also an elite in the sense that the Times is indisputably a tastemaker and trendsetter – small number of people with enormous influence. But when you come right down to it, most media have the property of being elitist simply because they are one-way “I talk you listen” propositions, with enormous capital costs creating barriers to entry. Of course blogs change all that. Though even within the blog world, there will always be an elite – the most popular blogs with the widest audiences. They tend to act like the MSM because they, too, are one-way “I talk you listen” propositions, and that always goes to one’s head.

Simon Owens: As someone who has appeared on live television, are there many differences between the televised political world and the political blogosphere?

Don Luskin: There are all the differences in the world. Blogging is personal and natural, and can be a reflection of one’s own personality and style. Television is a highly controlled and structured environment in which guests must fit into very narrow time slots, and cannot really express themselves because they are always responding to surprise questions asked by someone else. There are elements in common, though. Television succumbs to the temptation to be sensationalistic, in a quest for a wide audience. Blogs often do the same thing.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Don Luskin: I always get a laugh from Best of the Web Today by Jim Taranto. For people interested in economics/politics, I’d suggest Greg Mankiw’s blog, EconoPundit, Reality is Unreal, and George Reisman’s blog.

Related posts: Interview with Angry Bear, To The People blogger owes the ACLU $100 and me an apology, New Trends in online traffic

There’s an article over at the Washington Post that talks about new websites that are getting popular. It claims that growth is slowing at some of the most well-known internet sites and it’s getting steadily bigger in social-networking sites.
New Trends in Online Traffic::

While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information.

The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year.

…

The number of monthly visitors to each site rose at rates ranging from 185 percent (Citysearch) to 528 percent (Blogger.com) between February 2005 and February 2006. Their growth far exceeded the 4 percent increase in overall Internet visitors in the United States during that period.

Watch this space in the future, because I’ll have an exclusive interview with a person who has used a networking site (Facebook) to hook up with girls and have sex. Scandalous!

via Search engine blog

I’m starting to question why people blog. Part of this has to do with seeing so many interesting blogs go unnoticed. Even sadder is the case of ghost blogs – they’re writing, but no one’s coming by. The future looks even bleaker – with more and more blogs being created everyday, there is too to read, even if some of it is remarkably good (for an example, take Steve Pavlina’s blog on personal development – almost every post is eye-opening and useful to your life, but reading it all would take a month!).

I thought it would be fun to list all the different reasons people blog for - I’ve posted a few below, but I’m sure you can come up with more reasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

Content publishing is huge. Blog Herald (popular blog news site) put the number of existing blogs in millions, and that was in early 2005. Personally, throwing out the spammers, I still think that we have more than enough blogs out there to keep us busy reading for several lifetimes.

So how do you pick the best blogs to read? And from Bloggasm’s perspective, how do we pick out the most interesting blogs to profile, rant and rave (and occasionally criticize) about?

Read the rest of this entry »