Influence
Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell have maintained that blogs are very influential. They show evidence that journalists from major newspapers regularly read the most popular blogs. Even blogs with low traffic levels have their day in the sun, when special posts are linked to by the bigger blogs. (Definition — A blog is influential if a blog read by people in elected office or employed at a major publication.)
I would argue that blogs are becoming influential on their own without the help of the big blogs. The trick is specialization. If you carve out your niche of expertise, then when an event occurs, people look to you. When a new book comes out, they look to you for a reaction.
In Sunday’s Times, there was an article on panda bears and how expensive they are to lease from China. Three or four paragraphs in, the journalist refers to the bloggers who specialize in pandas. Who knew there were such a thing? It is becoming common place to refer to the opinion of bloggers in nearly every feature piece or policy specific article in the paper. National-level articles are much less likely to cite bloggers.
Specialization and predictability are two things that I’m not good at, but I must be slowly getting there. When Maureen Dowd’s book came out, people showed up here to see what I was going to say about it. When Linda Hirshman’s article in American Prospect was published, blogger friends sent me the link. People like to see me froth around the mouth.
This lowly blog has gotten the attention of writers from the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Publicists are sending me books to review. I’m being asked to post information about protests and rallies. I’m totally not worthy.
Of course, we are talking about influence only in terms of political power here. Much harder to measure is the influence of the many amazing, personal blogs.
(Part 3 later or tomorrow)
Apt. 11d 
Panda bloggers? Now I’m amazed.
By the way, I’m getting pop-up ads here on your site which only started happening today. It only shows up on the first time I load up your site in a session and the URL is from iLead.
LikeLike
pop ups??? eeew. thanks, Ancarett. I will have to find out if this is a new typepad thing. Hope not. I actually have to pay a lot of money for this blog.
LikeLike
Ancarett,
iLead is malware–check your computer. It’s often packaged in Java modules like counters.
LikeLike
OOo, I did some investigating in between bouts of sickness (got to love the way that kids bring home germs!) and ran across the news that webstats4u has inserted a pop-up code in their counter: http://www.drliew.net/archives/001981.html
Considering I run adaware, hijack this and a few other spyware/adware/malware detectors every week, I was surprised to see this (and in Firefox, to boot, but I’m still only running 1.07).
LikeLike
Laura,
I think these posts are fascinating, and I wish I had time to process them and respond right now. I will offer a few quick thoughts:
First, we can’t evaluate success without specifying goals. I don’t think you created this blog largely to affect the political process, did you? Blogs like yours have multiple goals, from venting and writing in that journal-y sort of way, to being funny, to being thought-provoking and maybe even shaping some opinions. So I want to make sure that your State of the Blog address keeps the earlier goals in mind. You brighten people’s days, and, presumably you brighten your own from time to time, which has its own intrinsic value.
But I understand why this post moves on to “influence.” And I agree that it’s really hard to measure. Links and hits tells us so little. There may be people who have rethought disability issues because of your blog, but they might scarcely show up as links or hits. And I’m sure this is complained about elsewhere, but can we move away from the obsession with hits–and hit envy?! It is such a crude measure. There is so much clicking around on the internet that my hope, if I had a blog, would be for something about the quality of hits, not quantity of hits. Which is better: 1,000 people who come to 11D for six seconds each, or 50 people who actually spend the time it takes to read a long post?
Finally, I hope that you’ll include community-building in your measure of success. I know a few people now because of this blog. That’s actually worth a lot to me, and this could manifest itself in all kinds of ways in the future. But then I’ve always liked those communitarian answers better than those individualistic ones. (Side question: So why are there so many libertarians blogs out there?!)
I know: this is far longer than “comments” should be. I’ll save other thoughts for later. Now, please tell us, who is sitting behind you when you are delivering that State of the Blog address.
LikeLike
“Blogs like yours have multiple goals, from venting and writing in that journal-y sort of way, to being funny, to being thought-provoking and maybe even shaping some opinions.”
Thanks, RC, you nailed what I’m doing here, which is mostly just farting around. These posts are perhaps confusing, because sometimes I’m talking about this blog and sometimes I am writing about blogs in general. I’m just spewing out half digested ideas to get feedback, which is also one of the functions of this blog.
Influence as getting read by people of power. Yes, that is definitely only one form of influence, but it is a standard political sciency sort of definition. It is somewhat quantifiable. Influence as raising awareness about issues is somewhat political sciency, but it is much harder to measure.
I was riffing off the Drezner/Farrell paper, and that’s how they define influence. It’s also the main purpose of many bloggers. This isn’t a typical blog.
Community building is an amazing function of the blogosphere. Funny thing is that I spent the afternoon writing an essay about the community of bloggers in this corner of the Internet and how much I adore everybody. Then I contrast virtual communities with real community life, yadda yadda, bring in some de Tocqueville and Putnam, yadda yadda. We’ll see how it works out.
Who is sitting behind me as I’m delivering this address? Well, nobody sits still around here. Imagine two boys leaping out of their chairs, stripping off their clothes, and dancing to techno music.
LikeLike