The Egalitarian Blogosphere

This has got to be the silliest critique of the blogosphere I’ve seen in years. Nick Carr writes that the blogosphere is a “fraud,” a “grand system of patronage operated by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite.” He says that non-”A List” bloggers are like peasants begging at the gates of the royal elites, pathetically linking to them in a desperate hope that the “A list” blogger will take pity on them and link back. He quotes Seth Finklestein’s tale of woe:

I [write my blog] because:

1) I was suckered into the idea that blogs were a way to “route around” media power, and to be HEARD.

2) I had delusions of influence.

3) The random-payoff of attention makes it seem far more effective than it actually is.

4) It’s painful to admit that you’ve wasted so much time and effort and pretty much nobody is listening.

Blog evangelism is very cruel, as it preys on people’s frustrated hopes and dreams.

My blog is read by a few dozen fans … I’ve come close to shutting it down at times, and will finally reach the breaking-point eventually.

Seth gives the impression that he toils in obscurity, with maybe 20 or 30 people reading what he writes on a good day. Yet Alexa ranks Seth’s site #84,819 among all web sites, with a “reach” of 24 readers per million web users. In contrast, TLF is ranked #295,434, and we have a “reach” of 4 per million. Technorati tells a similar story: TLF is ranked #7076 among all blogs with inbound links from 294 sites. Seth’s blog is ranked #5443, with inbound links from 365 blogs.

Now, TLF obviously isn’t an “A List” blog. We’re probably not even a “B List” blog. But if our traffic stats are to be believed, about 1500 unique individuals visit our site (or at least download our content to their RSS aggregators) each day. Extrapolating, I think it’s safe to say that Seth gets at least a few hundred, and probably several thousand, daily readers. Even if we assume that many of those are people who never actually read the sites their aggregators download, it’s safe to say that Seth gets more than “a few dozen” daily readers.

Personally, I think TLF’s readership–even if it’s only a couple hundred people–is fantastic. I feel extraordinarily fortunate that I get to write about whatever strikes my fancy and have several hundred people read it and give me feedback. A decade ago, it would have been extraordinarily difficult to achieve that without getting a job as a full-time journalist.

TLF has given me a few opportunities for “influence.” My blogging led directly to a quote in the Wall Street Journal back in November and an op-ed in the New York Times in March. I’d be lying if I said the possibility of such opportunities arising in the future isn’t one of the reasons I blog.

But at the same time, there’s no way the occasional publicity opportunities, by themselves, would be sufficient motivation for me to blog a couple of posts a day. The far more important motivation is that I enjoy discussing ideas. I think it’s fantastic that I sometimes get to interact with prominent tech policy experts like Ed Felten and Randy Picker. I love the fact that I can post half-baked policy arguments and get virtually instantaneous feedback from people who possess much deeper technical knowledge than me. And most fundamentally, I enjoy the process of writing itself, when it’s about a subject I’m currently interested in. I think the intellectual questions related to technology policy are fascinating, and I find writing to be a form of intellectual exploration: sometimes I’ll finish a post (or series of them) in a different place than I expected to be when I started.

So obviously I hope that a couple years from now our traffic will rival that of TechDirt and Boing Boing. But I’m not expecting that, and it’s certainly not my primary motivation for blogging. If it were, I think I’d probably be driven crazy, as Seth apparently is, chasing the mirage of fame and fortune.

The Carr/Finklestein perspective on the web seems to totally misunderstand the mathematics of power laws. Yes, the top few bloggers get orders of magnitude more traffic than the rest of us. But there isn’t a sharp distinction between the “A List” and the rest of us. Nick Carr himself is an excellent example of this point. Is he in the “A List?” Alexa says his “reach” is 64 per million, about 3 times what seth gets and about 15 times what TLF gets. Techdirt, indisputably an “A List” blog, gets 431 per million, about 6 times as much. Personally, I would be absolutely thrilled if, a year or two from now, TLF got as much traffic as Carr does now. Obviously, getting Techdirt-level traffic would be even better, but Carr levels would be just fine by me. In the same way, I suspect there are thousands of bloggers out there who would be thrilled to get TLF/Seth Finklestein levels of traffic. In short, the blogosphere is not a world of aristocrats and peasants, it’s a smooth continuum, with thousands of bloggers occupying a middle ground between obscure blogs with a few dozen readers and “A List” blogs with hundreds of thousands.

It should be obvious that not everyone’s blog can have thousands of readers. So it’s absurd to claim that it’s somehow a failure of the blogosphere that Seth’s blog “only” has a few hundred readers. The point is that there are far, far more Seth Finklesteins in the world than there were in the pre-Internet world, when the world really was divided into “haves” with audiences that numbered in the tens of thousands and “have nots” who had to content themselves with the occasional letter to the editor.

Carr is equally wrong to portray the elites of the blogosphere as some kind of closed, self-perpetuating club. The blogosphere is only about 5 years old. Even if it were true that the same bloggers have dominated the elite ranks since the blogosphere’s inception, that wouldn’t prove very much–the elite newspapers have dominated the national debate for decades. But Carr’s caricature isn’t even accurate. As just one exampleompare Instapundit, which ruled the blogospheric roost in 2002-04 to Daily Kos, a site that was obscure at the start of 2003, surpassed Instapundit in mid-2004, and today (according to Alexa) gets more than double the traffic. Sure doesn’t look like a closed elite to me.

No one ever claimed that the blogosphere would make everyone precisely equal. Power laws are an inevitable feature of human societies; there will always be people who are more famous than the rest of us. What’s different about the blogosphere is that it’s far flatter and and far more dynamic than the power laws that dominated the old media world. There are thousands and thousands of “B List” and “C List” bloggers who have non-trivial audiences. And dozens of bloggers each year go from obscurity to the vaunted “A List” due to a mixture of talent and good fortune. In short, the blogosphere is a far more egalitarian and meritocratic medium than the 20th Century media it’s supplanting.

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