A Year in the Sphere

My "blogiversary" is fast approaching. That means, since it's unlikely I'll abandon my blog within the next week or so, I'll soon be celebrating the anniversary of my first blog post and my first year in the blogosphere.

And it's been quite a year. Since I started this blog, it's been nominated for a Koufax Award for Best Blog. (Something I found out accidentally, while checking my statistics on Typepad and visiting links that had referred back to my blog.) I don't know who nominated me, but I was bowled over that I'd even been nominated. I also found out my blog had been picked up by BAN News Service, after my friend Hope emailed me to let me know. The biggest blog-related event was getting contacted, interviewed and then hired by EchoDitto,where I know work as a Blogmaster, managing a blog for one of our clients. Basically, I became a professional blogger. Most recently, I was interviewed by a reporter who was doing an article for the Advocate, on gay bloggers. I haven't seen the article yet, but I'm told it will be out sometime in October.

Like I said it's been quite a year, and certainly more eventful than I expected when I started this blog.

What got me started thinking about my upcoming blogiversary were two recent articles about blogging, which have been discussed fairly exstensively in the blogosphere. The first was the recent New York Times article, and the other was the Billmon piece from the Los Angeles Times. There was also an acquaintance of mine who was curious about my standing in the blogosphere, did a little research and found I ranked 557th at TTLB, a least at the time he checked. So, I didn't make the top 500 (so close), but it got me thinking about my place in the blogosphere.

After someone at work asked me what I thought the NYT piece, I figured I'd better read it. I have to admit, I was underwhelmed. Mostly, it followed the antics of the folks I call the "über bloggers"—folks whose readers number into the tens and perhaps even hundreds of thousands, like Atrios, Kos, Wonkette, and Josh Marshall—at the Democratic and Republican conventions. While the NYT did offer a brief glimpse into the lives of people whose site stats I've envied at one time or another, it felt a bit like I was getting a guided tour through a zoo exhibit. ("...and here we see the bloggers in their typical habitat. Note the darkened room, lit only by the glow of the monitor, and the empty Diet Coke cans scattered about the environment...") In some ways it was gratifying to know that people who have seemed to me to be the icons of the blogosphere were human. It was something of a relief to hear about Wonkette's past failures and present ambitions, or Kos' uncertainties about his overnight rise as a blog celebrity, and Marshall's conflicted desires for freedom and "legitimacy." However, the writer seemed fascinated that bloggers—even those who are currently at the top of the heap in terms of hits, vists, and readersip—are surprisingly human. But that was something I already knew. The first blogs I read, and the ones that caused me to start thinking I could do it too, were written by friends of mine; folks I already knew as "real people" before they became bloggers.

Compared to Cox (Wonkette), Kos, Atrios and Marshall I am pretty much a small-time blogger, who has a modest readership, had some successes out of the starting gate, and is on the verge of finishing up a pretty good first year. I don't have congressional candidates and others calling me to place ads on my blog. I don't sell ad space. I don't make a living off my personal blog. I can't claim to be an expert on much of anything except my own life, which is what I write about a good deal of the time. I may write about politcs, but what I know about politics I picked up from doing a lot of reading, and from living and working in D.C. for 10 years (though I don't have much in the way of political connections or credentials to show for the past decade). I post about politics because it's something I'm interested in and something that affects my life, but I often end up asking more questions than I answer.

What surprises me is how many people actually read my blog. Lately, I've averaged about 350 visits a day (I pay more attention to visits than to hits, since I learned the former is a better reflection of actual readership), so I figure I have somewhere between 250 and 300 regular readers. When I started this blog, I wouldn't have thought 300 people would be interested enough in what I had to say, but the numbers pretty much speak for themselves. After being at it for a year, I guess I must be doing something right, even if I'm not always sure I know what I'm doing.

If I sit down and think about it for a minute, I can articulate some cogent thoughts about what it takes to make a blog reasonably succesful and develop a readership. Part of it's a mystery, at least to me. I can't tell anyone what to do to become the next Atrios or Kos, if that's what they want to become. Some things are obvious, like "finding your voice." It sounds simple enough, but it takes a lot of work in terms of just writing until you fall into something that feels right to you and is also accessible and authentic to readers. Readers will let you know if you're succeeding by coming back often, and commenting on occasion. It's a bit of a cliché at this poitn, but blogging is a conversation. But in the past year I've been more involved in doing it than thinking about it. This year when I wasn't writing my own blog, I was registering it with other sites or search engines, reading and commenting on other blogs that interested me, and linking to blogs that I enjoyed reading or that had linked to me. A year later, I looked up and I was in a much different place than when I started. I can relate somewhat, though on a much smaller scale to Kos, when he says in the NYT piece "I never intended to be here. Nothing forshadowed..." the amount of attention even my modest blog has gotten.

I stumbled across the Billmon column from reading a post by Kevin Drum, another "über blogger". Being relatively new to the game, compared to Billmon, I have to admit that much of his column just sounded like an old-timer mourning the "good old days" of blogging and bemoaning how much the medium has changed. Well, of course it's changed, and it will change again. It changes everytime a new blog is started and another one is abandoned. It changes when the election seasons revs up and again when it sputters down to a slow idle. Based on what I've seen, if anybody can adapt—and quickly—to the ups and downs in the worlds of media and poltics, it's the bloggers. At the end of the NYT piece, the author aptly notes just this trait among bloggers.

The bloggers, by contrast, adapted quickly. By the time the Republican convention rolled around in August, they had figured something out, staying far, far away from that zoo down at Madison Square Garden. They had begun to work the way news people do at manufactured news events, by sticking together, sharing information, repeating one another's best lines. They were learning their limitations, and at the same time they were digging around and critiquing and fact-checking and raising money. They still liked posting dirty jokes and goofy Photoshopped pictures of politicians, but they had hope, and more than a few new ideas, and they were determined to make themselves heard.

Blogs and bloggers may become somewhat grafted onto mainstream media, at least a few like the aforementioned bloggers might. But as long as there's a considerable number of people who can afford a computer and internet access, and who think they have one or two things to say, blogging will remain as independent, elclectic and expressive as it has been thus far and is now. For every Atrios, Kos, Wonkette and Marshall there are hundreds, if not thousands or hundreds of thousands, of blogs like mine with a few hundred readers here and there. Together we have more readers than any one blog or blogger put together. And we are not just listening to them. We are talking to each other too.

Comments

[Tim Who?]

Outstanding progress for your first year. I also just past my first year and would be surprised if I had 20 regular readers. Your writing makes all the difference in the world. My numbers are much more normal for a first year blog while yours speak of the greatness you have achieved and the greatness yet to come. The one constant I have read in your writing is your underestimation of your abilities.
If I may be so bold.

You fly 20 feet above the ground while commenting on how difficult walking is. If you ever figure out that you can fly, you'll soar like an eagle.

250-300 regular readers?
Do you have any idea how many first year blogs have those kinds of numbers?

One in a million Terrance, One in a million.

Congratulations on a blog well done and a life well lived.

[Sean Hurley]

Congrats on your first year.

But bear in mind that you may have more than 250-300 readers--readers who read your rss-feed, like I do.

Best,

[Houston]

Congratulations and best wishes for the next year.

[silbatron]

congrats, T! you deserve every nomination you get for this blog. let us know if we can do any voting. and i'm glad that you're not Kos