Political blogging has changed a lot since I first started blogging six years ago. I first wrote about the changes in the blogosphere last July and received a lot of attention from that post. I rewrote that post into an essay, but I'm not sure what to do with it. So, here it is: 
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My conclusion is that it has become very difficult for amateur bloggers to find a sizable audience anymore for several reasons:

1. Blogging is very time consuming. It's difficult for someone with a day job to compete with people who are hired by newspapers or journals, who have all day to find blog fodder and write thoughtful posts. Faced with that enormous competition and burnout, many amateur bloggers have dropped out.

2. The best amateur bloggers were absorbed by newspapers and journals. Once these bloggers became pros, they stopped linking to the amateur bloggers. I even have a little data on that subject.

3. People are trading links with Facebook and Twitter now. Amateur bloggers have quit and begun using those mediums instead.

4. Readers have migrated to the professional blogs. The professional bloggers have a built-in audience, because the newspapers can promote their blogs on their websites. Some professional blogs, such as the Huffington Post, have done even more serious damage.

Huffington Post has done much to change the old system
of blogging. In December 2009, Huffington Post received 9.8 million readers. It is by
far the most read political blog with readership surpassing the websites of
traditional newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Huffington Post is not like the old-style blogs of 2004.
The many authors primarily link to articles in the mainstream press or
reproduce large portions of AP articles. Any original material comes from media
and Hollywood celebrities, such as Paul Reiser, Alex Baldwin, or Martha
Stewart. They rarely link to other bloggers and do not get the  ways and
norms that greased the system in the old days. HuffPo has gained prominence not
through reciprocity and community, but through old-fashioned media celebrity
power, capital investment in a high powered website, and a staff of nameless
drones that can provide links to the latest information quickly.

Why is this important?

Back in the early days of blogging, it
was very popular to believe that the Internet acted as a leveling device. The
Internet doesn’t care who your daddy is. It doesn’t care if you’re carrying
around twenty extra pounds. It doesn’t know which graduate school you went to.
Through the system of linkage of quality blog posts and a connected A-list, the
Internet theoretically rewarded merit, hard work, humor, and originality.

However, the Internet has never lived up to its promise.
The democratizing tendencies of the
Internet have always been overstated. To write blog posts about politics, one
needs a very high education level and a very high interest in politics. In his
book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, Matthew Hindman points out that
bloggers are an elite group. Hindman is correct to a degree. In our 2005 survey
of bloggers, we found that 39 percent of bloggers had a BA, 33 percent had an
MA, and 11 percent had a PhD, JD, or MD. Bloggers were always highly educated.
However, these original independent bloggers were not a traditional elite; they
were a lower echelon of elites, the Junior League of elites, and the blogs
enabled these young, untenured professors and kids just out of Harvard to get
attention for their ideas and research. With the changes in the blogosphere,
the Internet no longer enables this Junior League to jump to the head of the
pack. 

Anyhow, I just thought I would put this rough essay up on the blog. I see that Matt Ygelsias and Chris Bower were talking about this subject over the weekend.

One of the things that I love about blogging is that I can insert myself into a debate. As an unemployed academic stuck in the deepest depths of suburbia, I'm very much of an outsider. I'm a suburban mom who gets pizza for her kids on a Friday night. Nobody takes me seriously. But with my blog, I can get my two cents in now and then.There's no guarantee that my posts will be linked to and read beyond my circle of regular readers, but I feel better after I hit that "publish" button.

UPDATE: Henry Farrell responds to the data that I found that showed that pro bloggers link less to amateur bloggers.