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)