Dan,

Thanks for this very interesting and useful entry. Essentially, your conclusion is right - blogs may not be the ultimate answer in terms of anti-establishment tool; but without blogs Internet misses something and that is the value.

One thing I do not understand is how one can expect to make living on blogs? Typically, most of the bloggers are churning information obtained from mainstream media and re-arranging the pieces and undertaking the analysis. 'Hard fact' creation is much less, traditional media still does that. Your opinions could add value if you are a top notch expert in a field and you are presenting those details. But that is not easy. The expert would loath to put the trade secrets in public when he/she is getting money by other outlets; common readers cannot understand all the technical details and host of other difficulties in presenting real technical information on a blog. This means effectively blogs have very limited playing field to operate on; restricting possibility of true value addition for readers and hence really less possibility of earning money directly by way of blogging. That means blogs would help the owner in different ways but unlikely to make money directly. Indeed it is a laughable proposition to depend on blogs for day to day living.

By the way, blogging is fun though. When direct human interactions are restricted; it is a great way of communication with people around the world on the topic you like.

Blogs may be many things, but they fail to solve our most fundamental problem in getting information/opinion: one-sidedness. People prefer newspapers that reflect their worldviews and they read bloggers who they already agree with.

Few people try to read both Brad D Long and D Drezner, Juan Cole and Fareed Zakaria. What we need is not more information. What we need is dialogue, the courage and patience to listen to a different view, to digest it and to respond to it. Blogs, like other media, are used by many to reinforce their existing beliefs.

The true revolution will be one that forces people to confront a multiplicity of views.

I guess you mean that blogs are kaputt rather than caput. Otherwise, fine post.

I guess if all you wanted out of your blog were an Instapundit size audience and big check from Blogads some of that might bother you.

Some of us blog just because we want to. There are actually blogs out there with no ads on them! Some us aren't in it for money power and fame. We're just having fun.

If folks think there's no money in blogs, then they obviously think there's no money in marketing, either. That's all right. I'd rather people thought that.

A combo of wishful thinking and overt cluelessness. Funny catch!

And get a real job? Never.

"If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium."

A journalist wrote this? Pot, meet kettle. And a question for Clive Thompson - was there a time when it was easy to eke out a living blogging? And as to "the game being fixed", let me take a wild guess about the political orientation of the bloggers saying that.

An interesting thread here is that the reporters you've quoted all seem to think bloggers are in it to make money. That's a nice byproduct of a successful blog, but (almost) nobody with that objective is going to start a political blog considering the immeasurably larger demand for porn (not the opinion kind).

Promotion of, or better yet the power to impose, ones political/moral beliefs is a considerably more powerful motivator than financial gain, something nobody in the media field seems capable of grasping. But that's what will keep blogging alive, not click through ads.

Why do you think the power-law structure of blogging is incorrect?

Problems with blogs:

1) extremely high noise-to-signal ratio. You need to surf through a dozen blogs to find an insight that is a) accurate b) fresh c) not buried beneath layers of sarcasm and exaggeration for effect.

2) fragmentation. The proliferation of blogs benefits noisier, more vitriolic and sarcastic bloggers at the expense of sane and moderate ones.

3) ritualized politics-as-tent-revival, or extreme partisanship. 1) and 2) bleed independent bloggers and add to the visibility and market sway of blogs that have a predictable and partisan angle: all anti-jihad-all-the-time (LGF), all anti-Bush-all-the-time (Kos, TPM), all anti-neocons-all-the-time (Juan Cole), all anti-Dems-all-the-time (Powerline) etc. Reynolds is also predictable and largely partisan ("Dems are overplaying their hand!"). To build a blog-brand, sell that old time religion.

What blogs never developed and should have developed:

1) a sense that the reader, not the blogger, comes first.

2) owing to 1), a near-total failure (Kos excepted) to develop useful, innovative funcationality and features that deliver benefits to the consumer/reader such as community, ranking or trust systems, ease of search and filtering etc.

3) any kind of segmentation or clustering of audiences so as to deliver a meaningful, targeted, qualified demographic to advertisers. To any product advertiser-- as opposed to party pollsters and fund-raising operations-- blogs' audience is complete mush: undifferentiated by either geography, income, education, lifestage, family size, purchasing behavior, age.... The only distinct feature of the blogosphere's demographic is that nearly all of the readers are men, ie, are not the household decisionmaker for the vast majority of consumer goods on offer. Brilliant.

Bottom line: the vast majority of blogs are Limbaugh with (at most) one-hundredth of the audience, and without any ability to serve local advertising as Limbaugh's local affiliates do. In other words, a vast increase in hot air, rancor and noise, signifying not much in particular to anyone save party and single-interest fund-raising operations.

To be fair, there are many excellent bloggers such as Dan D and the specialized profs, esp law profs and economists, who largely confine their musings to their areas of expertise. DeLong on social security is a treat; DeLong on the wickedness of the Iraq War is yet more noise and hot air.

But these are not mass media. These have an impact in Washington, just as The New Republic does, but their market impact is next-to-nil. They are of zero interest to the media biz and of little interest in the larger culture. Neither murdoch nor the NYT will ever pay $450 million for any collection of such blogs, as they did for MySpaces (kids interested in music and all the stuff kids buy) or About.com (suburban moms and single women interested in product info and advice for all the tens of thousands of $$$$$ worth of stuff they buy each year). It's about reaching people who actually go online to buy stuff, not to bloviate. Ie, not middle-aged male politics junkies wasting their employers' time.

Kerim,

Few people try to read both Brad D Long and D Drezner, Juan Cole and Fareed Zakaria. What we need is not more information. What we need is dialogue, the courage and patience to listen to a different view, to digest it and to respond to it. Blogs, like other media, are used by many to reinforce their existing beliefs.

Amen. But the key to solving this problem lies in the format, not the content. That is, in the navigation features, the user experience, the way the content is served, stored, searched, filtered, sent to third parties, etc. When Silicon Valleys product marketing whizzes discover blogs, then maybe we'll have some progress. But the uni-directional, any-to-all, unstored, unfiltered, unsearchable chat thread format is almost useless as a means of attaining the dialogue that you (and I, and most people) would dearly love to hear and see.

Thibaud-- I hear you. I was sounding the same calls last spring with The New Gatekeepers series, which covered the problems of blogs and the blogosphere as they are today.

I came back here to check up on the Professor (nice to learn that his new gig will bring him to the Hub next year). One research bit I'm tracking down is the little-known correction that Dan and Henry did on Shirky's hypothesis-- that, oh, by the way, the data really shows a lognormal distribution.

re: "Hey, mainstream media types..." don't worry, there is enough blog-love that gets in the "mainstream media." It's just that there hasn't been enough serious criticism in article-length form. Saying that there's been a blog post here or there that has punctured blog triumphalism doesn't quite cut it.

I've always felt that blogs are a welcome addition to information & society and their potential has only more room to grow. What I've always disliked about the blogosphere is the chest thumping triumphalism of it all. Left or Right, all blogs suffer from congratulatory backpatting disease. As if having a blogger account makes you a bold revolutionary citizen journalist.

I think it's hilarious that he made a blog to handle the feedback. AND, I think I'll risk blogs until I see that they actually go down. If nothing else, they are enjoyable!

Boy. I guess it's a good thing I'm lazy and just don't care, if this is the way things are going!

Interesting that the Internet bubble has burst. The complaint heard on NBC is that the ratings of the Olympics are down because it's too easy to get results and descriptions, even video of the events, on an on demand basis. Hmmm. . . .

Kerim wrote:

"The true revolution will be one that forces people to confront a multiplicity of views."

And when we have tied people down and held their eyes open, what will we have then?

A clockwork orange.

Thibaud:

Most of your list of problems has to do with political blogs. Do only political blogs count?

And politics is partisan, has lowest-common denominator raunchiness about it (in democracies anyway), and uh, well, what did you expect?

I like things open. Most open political expression is noise. Rush Limbaugh and Al Davis bore me. But isn't it up to me to find or participate in interesting discussions?

And maybe it's not so bad for people to discuss politics at the level they understand it?

I wonder if the issue for you really has to do with blogs, or the way people express themselves.

"...longing for an eroticism of fact"?

When I get around to posting my personal ad on Nerve, I'm definitely lifting that line. And wouldn't a call sign of 'TrevorButterworth' be totally money?

Really, it just sounds like more of the same from Old Media. I particularly like the claim about "no money to be made off blogging" (paraphrase)

When I hear journalists question why anyone would blog as a hobby, it reminds me of old-time technologists who wonder why anyone would contribute to open source software. I know it offends their sensibilities that anyone would see journalism as a hobby, but really anything could be a hobby.

Frankly, I welcome the new age of information where the old information moguls are quickly losing control and proving their irrelevance with each passing day. Blogs may have their fair share of disadvantages, but I'll accept those disadvantages if it means I have a shot at hell at getting the full story.

At least with heavily biased sites like DailyKos and PoliPundit, they don't pretend to be anything that they are not. That is my biggest complaint about the media. They continue to claim objectivity when they are anything but.

Anthony - yes, most of my critique has to do with political blogs. The audience for same is worthless to advertisers-- a few orders of magnitude smaller than other undifferentiated 25-54 yr old male audiences (talk radio, Stern, Super Bowl) and without any localization potential (unless you're talking about local political blogs-- there's an idea....). As to non-political blogs, those are indeed very valuable-- pls see my comments about MySpaces and About.com.

Dear Trev showed his weak hand right from the start of that piece--the picture (or was it two?) of AM Cox and her pseudo-blog compatriots at Gawker media gave it all away. Quick show of hands here--which of you regular readers of quality blogs like Dan's have a single Gawker bookmark? Thought not. They are the Conde Nast of the blogosphere--cheap flash, no substance.

My husband shook his said in disgust and concluded: "when I know more about the blogosphere than a journalist covering it for the FT, you know the mainstream press is in trouble." Lazy journalists putting forth predetermined arguments that suit their own ends? Wasn't that why the blogosphere was so important in the first place? What's changed? Trev, back to journalism 101.

Shouldn't it be easy to improve on the comment feature (as Thibaud indicated)? Livejournal does threads, surely it can't be that difficult. That would go a long way. Also, a "someone has replied to your thread" email alert system would be helpful in managing the debates.

Those wouldn't be hard and would make a nontrivial difference, not in readership but readability.

jb - it's simple. The barrier is the bloggers themselves, who are more concerned with their own precious pensees than with delivering value and benefits to a consumer audience. When/if blogging ever becomes focused on customers rather than bloggers, it may become financially interesting.

I am recent to the blogosphere. I crave good analysis but have little time and so stop by Real Clear Politics which compiles good analyis from a variety of sources including MSM. I find it easy to read both sides of an issue.

Furthermore, I take issue with the notion that MSM is where everyone gets their facts. I've been following the cartoon controversy. As most of you know, the cartoons were initially only accessible in the blogosphere. Moreover, I was able to to see a video about two counterprotesters at the Muslim protests in France. Two policemen hauled immediately them away out of concern for their safety but did nothing about the aggressive actions of some Muslim protestors...scary

The end of blogs? No, it really is a new world.

I am recent to the blogosphere. I crave good analysis but have little time and so stop by Real Clear Politics which compiles good analyis from a variety of sources including MSM. I find it easy to read both sides of an issue.

Furthermore, I take issue with the notion that MSM is where everyone gets their facts. I've been following the cartoon controversy. As most of you know, the cartoons were initially only accessible in the blogosphere. Moreover, I was able to to see a video about two counterprotesters at the Muslim protests in France. Two policemen hauled immediately them away out of concern for their safety but did nothing about the aggressive actions of some Muslim protestors...scary

The end of blogs? No, it really is a new world.