Who Blogs Too Much?
Picking up from the Kevin Drum-Matt Yglesias exchange on the Red-Queen race of contemporary pro-blogging, I will name names of people who blog too much among the folks I read. Some of the people are folks whose writing I’ve long enjoyed but whom I’ve practically given up on reading because, when faced with a count of 30 items in Google Reader – since breakfast – the heart sinks and the mind quails. And if you’ve ever seen a sinking quail you know they make awkward, fluttering crashes. It’s much easier to just click the “Mark All Read†button and resolve to catch the next batch. Vice Michael Ledeen, I say, “Slower, please.†Try “going Galt†for a half-hour at a time, maybe.
* Matt writes way too much. I read most of it because he’s my favorite blogger, but now and then I will flush as many as two-dozen posts because, shit, there’s more to life. There’s even more to blog reading.
* Megan McArdle is on this list as the contrapositive. She’s a paid, professional blogger but manages to keep her average posting rate below a post an hour most days. More like this!
* Atrios should be on the list except for one thing: Atrios has mastered the art of the short damn post. Also, half the posts are links to Yglesias, so get booked against the Matt Account.
* Kevin Drum himself is kind of on the edge. He’s been known to top ten posts a day, and my rule of thumb is, once you hit double digits you’re just wanking.
* James Joyner is a smart, funny conservative voice of exactly the sort we need more of in public life. Which is not to say we need two dozen blog posts a day from him specifically. Add in the co-bloggers he keeps out of concern that in the fifteen minutes or so between his own posts our attention may wander and it’s, you know, a lot.
* Daniel Larison is, like Kevin Drum, right on the edge in terms of raw post count. No one would say that the typical Larison post flies by one, so there’s a certain . . . commitment involved in keeping up.
* Hit & Run has, since this morning, 34 posts, less than one every twenty minutes. That’s not a blog; that’s a lifestyle.
* Attackerman is on the list because I’m just jealous. If I had half Spencer Ackerman’s work ethic and half as much of half as many of his different kinds of courage I’d be, well, a half-assed Spencer Ackerman, which would be an improvement over my present, unimpressive condition. Still, 135 posts a day about something called “COIN,†each with titles based on Nas lyrics, is not “professional blogging.†It’s Shock and Awe.
* Andrew Sullivan, though, is the US defense budget of blogo-production – bigger than the rest of the world’s effort put together, astonishingly extravagant and overextended, and yet, undeniably magnificent for all that. I mean, I give up; no way I’m reading all 74 blog entries from today – yes, I counted – and yet, I feel the lack. Sully is the medium’s one true genius. He is simply taking the implication of the online political (in the broad sense) diary to its implicit conclusion. He is silly like us, but his gift survives it all. I would read it all, and enjoy it, agreeing sometimes and disagreeing others, condescending now and bowing ten minutes later, but I would never have the time to read anything else. I dip in when I get the chance, and sometimes speed-skim. And you can be damn sure I don’t have time to watch the pet videos. Alas!
Now imagine trying to watch all the Youtube clips and bloggingheads episodes and Drew Carey documentaries these people, and the rest of your subscription list, put up. You’d need to be a professional blog reader.
In the spirit of this age of economic restructuring, I will simply declare how often people may blog. Most of you should average four to six posts a day. If you’re a group blog, you may post once an hour. If you’re Hit & Run, exactly one post may be by either Michael Moynihan or Katherine Mangu-Ward. On days when Cathy or Michael Young simply must post something, they are considered to use the Moynihan/Mangu-Ward slot. Jeff Winkler posts would be counted against the same budget, except Jeff Winkler is forbidden to blog. Cheer up, kid. At least you’re not Rick Wagoner.
Eric Martin is allowed to post each blog entry exactly once, somewhere. He’s still allowed to blog under that pseudonym at that site we’re not mentioning, because at least he rewrites his shit there to make it funny.
BJ Bjornson and Ron Beasley of Newshoggers will be required to prove they are not the same person, and also not fester.
There will be a cap-and-trade system in effect for the blogosphere beginning April 16th (to give people time to do their taxes), with auction. Proceeds will fund – me! We face a serious collective-action problem in the blogosphere which individual initiative alone cannot solve, as evidenced by my own futile attempt to singlehandedly reduce the global average blog posting rate since the fall. We need to all work together, as a team or a family, and it needs to benefit me and my cronies. Thank you.
UPDATE: Corrected Jeff Winkler’s first name. Nothing worse than being rude and wrong.
Comment by Thoreau —
April 1, 2009 @ 12:53 am
Jim, are you planning to demand the resignation of whoever is in charge of Pajamas Media? And will you force blogs to merge?
And Radley Balko should get a bailout for hitching his wagon to Hit and Run. You know, that place has been going downhill since Julian Sanchez left. (Drink!)
Comment by Jim Henley —
April 1, 2009 @ 12:56 am
I’m giving Red State thirty days to arrange a sale of themselves to Ananova.
Comment by B —
April 1, 2009 @ 1:12 am
But who should be made to post more…?
I get sad when Radley posts less than three in a day. Except when he posts those items that make me want to fly into a righteous rage. Which is a lot.
I wish Will Wilkinson posted more steadily…he seems to waffle between “not enough” and “much, much more than I can possibly handle.”
Kerry Howley should post more, period.
Comment by Sifu Tweety —
April 1, 2009 @ 1:36 am
Eric Martin is allowed to post each blog entry exactly once, somewhere. He’s still allowed to blog under that pseudonym at that site we’re not mentioning, because at least he rewrites his shit there to make it funny.
Heh. Those guys need to slow the fuck down, though. Who can keep up?
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
April 1, 2009 @ 1:53 am
Heh. Good thing I wasn’t drinking anything when I read this one. My nose can only handle high speed fluid flow so often…
~Jon (who wishes he had the problem of blogging too much)
Comment by Ray —
April 1, 2009 @ 3:40 am
“But who should be made to post more…? ”
That’s an excellent question. I’m sure there are some very popular bloggers out there who only post 2/3 times a week and could stand to post more, but I can’t think of any names right now…
Comment by dana —
April 1, 2009 @ 9:11 am
I went Galt before it was fashionable.
Comment by fester —
April 1, 2009 @ 9:11 am
I’ve never been in the same room as Ron or BJ —
Draw your own conclusions….
Fester
Comment by fester —
April 1, 2009 @ 9:12 am
actually my pace will be slowing down as an active 3 month old does an amazing job of tiring me out and diverting any and all spare mental capacity to loving the fact that she bursts into giggles whenever she sees Daddy (evidently she thinks I am very goofy!)
fester
Comment by DonBoy —
April 1, 2009 @ 9:30 am
Given the pace required to keep up, I’m started to consider a blogger asking me to take the time to watch a YouTube video as actually rude. Double if it’s just bloggers talking — you’re giving up one of the great features of written word, which is that you can take in the information faster than by listening.
Comment by kid bitzer —
April 1, 2009 @ 9:49 am
i’m not getting something.
i associate the name ‘eric martin’ with obwi.
does he post elsewhere?
is there a reason that we’re not mentioning obwi, or is it one of his other venues that we aren’t mentioning, or is this some other eric martin as well as some other site that i know nothing about?
and isn’t it obvious that hilzoy should post more, since everything she posts is made of truth and clarity and goodness?
Comment by Tom Scudder —
April 1, 2009 @ 9:55 am
Eric Martin also posts to American Footprints and to his own blog whose name I forget. (Total Information Awareness or something like that).
Rebecca Borgstrom should post more (sigh). So should Fafnir and Giblets (but not the Medium Lobster).
Comment by fester —
April 1, 2009 @ 10:29 am
Re #12 — Eric also posts at the Newshoggers and is the editor of a blog aggregater as well I believe.
Comment by Tom Scudder —
April 1, 2009 @ 11:03 am
Also, Eric tends to just cross-post the same posts to all possible blogs, thus the spammy nature of same for those persons who have more than one of his blogs on their rss reader or whatever.
Comment by nikkos —
April 1, 2009 @ 11:20 am
Seriously. If Andy, Matt, Drum et al knew how many of their posts get “marked as read” without ever having been read, they might cry.
Comment by David —
April 1, 2009 @ 11:20 am
I get sad when Radley posts less than three in a day. Except when he posts those items that make me want to fly into a righteous rage. Which is a lot.
There’s the rub, B. More Balko posts usually means more people and pets who’ve been unjustly brutalized by the authorities.
Comment by Eric Martin —
April 1, 2009 @ 1:00 pm
Ha!
Thing is Jim, some of those other sites ask for cross-posts even when I try to tell them that I feel kind of spammy doing it.
Still, I’ll try to curb my habit.
One a day – with an occasional exception.
Between the Hog, AmFoot and ObWi.
But I keep TIA as my archive, so I’m claiming a waiver there.
The site whose name we shan’t mention is also excluded for obvious reasons.
However, this only elides the point:
Why the fnck isn’t Jim Henley posting more? Seriously.
Comment by Jeromy —
April 1, 2009 @ 1:27 pm
Alright, go read Iowa Liberal (iowaliberal dot com)…1-3 posts a day, bitches!
Sometimes we’re busy. Sometimes we’re just living. Often we don’t feel the need to repeat what others are saying. After all, I read Sullivan obsessively, and so silence must receive its due…
…interrupted by fiery bursts of necessity.
Comment by Xanthippas —
April 1, 2009 @ 2:30 pm
By virtue of where I work and what I do, I end up reading a lot of blog posts in a day. That being said, there are still quite a few days where I might flush 100 or 200 blog posts down the drain, and somedays I “reset” and flush it all. I’ll admit to following bloggers like Yglesias, Ezra Klein and Sullivan because I feel like I’m supposed to, but on any given day I read probably 1/4 of what they write just because even I can’t keep up with their output. I feel guilty about that, but I get over it. And anyway I read enough bloggers who also read those three that if I miss anything important, I’m bound to see it somewhere else.
Comment by b-psycho —
April 1, 2009 @ 3:43 pm
I post whenever I feel like it. Sometimes I’ll post three, four times in a day, other times I’ll go a whole week without posting something.
Isn’t that the point to blogging, speak when you feel like it?
Comment by Shantyhag —
April 1, 2009 @ 7:06 pm
Boy, think you forgot Steve Benen (formerly Carpetbagger Report, now at the Washington Monthly)… he’s prodigious, but I wouldn’t miss a thing! Seriously, find myself refreshing the page 5-6 times an hour, only to find new posts.
Comment by fyreflye —
April 1, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
Have you ever tried to keep up with Boing Boing? 90% of their posts are trivial, but the remaining 10% are Gold. And you can’t tell which is which until you read them all and follow the damn links! Where else would I have heard of Kutiman?:
Comment by Neil B ☺ —
April 1, 2009 @ 9:51 pm
Steve Benin’s WaMo is just great, he fills Kevin’s shoes well (and Kevin does fine too.) Important about WaMo and Drum too: very good output and quality by the commentariat, often breathtakingly elaborate for comments yet cleverly terse as needed. Witty, erudite; these folks (sometimes me too) put post-level effort and thought into the material. One cute typical gem: in a discussion about pathetic Michael Steels saying he planned his weird games with Rush etc. to see what position he had on the chessboard, one of the wags simply wrote “pwn.”
It has influence too, I noted talking points of ours from discussions opposing Bush’s Social Security “reform” plan getting into LToEs, comments elsewhere, etc.
Comment by Rachel Liston —
April 2, 2009 @ 3:22 am
Very funny! The “Sully” part was really good.
This guy doesn’t blog too much – although I suspect he has angered partisan Democrats and liberals: Dissenting Justice
Comment by Mark Thompson —
April 2, 2009 @ 8:09 am
I have no idea what Eric’s pseudonymous “Site That Shall Not Be Named” may be. But I’m just going to pretend that it’s the site dedicated to “Power” of a certain nationality run by the World’s Most Infamous Neo-Conservative Troll Who Shall Not Be Named For Fear of Driving Traffic to Him. Because that site is absolutely hysterical and cannot possibly be anything other than a parody.
Comment by Shantyhag —
April 2, 2009 @ 10:20 am
It has influence too, I noted talking points of ours from discussions opposing Bush’s Social Security “reform†plan getting into LToEs, comments elsewhere, etc.
It sure does. When we started the Threhser (http://ThresherOnline.com), I openly and honestly mimicked some of the functionality of his site and did the easy traffic research. 50K+ unique visitors a day, and if you’ve ever perused the comment section, it’s a rather well-educated crowd (there’s, not ours necessarily– though I’d like to think so).
Comment by Johnathan Pearce —
April 2, 2009 @ 10:44 am
I blog once a day on Samizdata. I wondered whether I might be overdoing it when Perry de Havilland said, in a nice way, “thanks for keeping the site going”.
I have a busy day job, and one or two posts a day is my limit. And I tend to avoid weekends. My wife wants me to have a life!
Comment by Neil B ☺ —
April 2, 2009 @ 10:54 am
NBD, but I meant to refer to “Micheal Steele” not Michale Steels, re “pwn.” (Well it helps Google search – but have you noticed you can hardly use tricks like deliberate misspellings to bookmark stuff anymore, since Google will look at what it is sure “you meant” (some cheek, that!) anyway even if typed in quotes? They often don’t even bother with “did you mean _____?” anymore, the bastards.)
Comment by Neil B ☺ —
April 2, 2009 @ 10:55 am
Heh, I mean Michael Steele!