Snarking at the Blogwagon
posted by Dave Hoffman
Matt Labash has a piece up in the Weekly Standard about the YearlyKos convention. It contains many adjectives. And sentences. That are actually. Phrases. The tone is snark-a-licious.
Labash scorns Kos, the self-congratulation of the political netroots and its denizens, media and the politicians who enable (1) and (2), and quite possibly you, the reader, for supporting his trip to be a meta-analyst of the whole thing. In short, Labash has produced a long version of a classic blog post: sometimes funny, slashing and personal, but a wee bit parasitic.
But the article is worth reading, if only for a description of a media panel in which bloggers were told how to interact with the MSM. And for the following paragraph, where Labash considers a a topic I’ve previously bloviated about at length:
[S]ome cynics–I didn’t meet any at YearlyKos, but I’m sure they’re out there–would say this is a hype, like Internet IPOs or Vanilla Coke or Ross Perot. There are guys like Daily Standard contributor Dean Barnett who’ve reported that Daily Kos, which everybody assumes is growing by leaps and bounds, actually went from 23 million visitors in one month last fall to 16 million in May. There’s evidence like the recent Gallup poll which shows that blog reader growth was “somewhere between nil and negative in the past year,” that reading blogs ranks at the bottom of online activities, and that only 15 percent of the public reads blogs, even though there are over 40 million of them, meaning a lot of bloggers are talking to themselves. But Kos wants you to know this is a real, enduring movement not centered around his cult of personality. It’s about non-hierarchical netroots, it’s about “the volunteers.” Just like it was in the Reform party, a vibrant, healthy organization that, even after Ross Perot left it, still dominates American politics to this day.
Some of this is unfair (traffic on political blogs is tied to the electoral cycle: I’d bet that Kos rises again come this November) but some rings true (”a lot of bloggers are talking to themselves . . .”; traffic growth is slow to nill). Reports of the law blog colloquium at HLS this past Spring suggested similar awareness of the problems of overhyping a new medium. Interestingly, however, there is no real analogue in the the law blogosphere to Kos and like sites. Law blogs have almost uniformly adopted a comment system, which is a relatively flat form of reader participation (cf. the Kos diary system); we have few of the technical bells and whistles of the political sites (polls on your favorite Supreme Court justice, for example). Perhaps this conservative approach bodes well for the future of law blogs . . . or perhaps it simply reflects traditional lawyer fears of non-mediated institutions.
June 19, 2006 at 5:47 pm
Posted in: Blogging
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Responses (3)
Elizabeth - June 20, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Does it reflect poorly on me that I had to read this post twice?
Should I be ashamed that I sit here wondering if my posts are “sometimes funny, slashing and personal, but a wee bit parasitic”?
Should I be more ashamed that I had never even *contemplated* that my posts might be “a wee bit parasitic”?
Perhaps I should not admit, then, that I do not know what a parasitic post reads like. . . .
Dave Hoffman - June 20, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Elizabeth, your difficulties no doubt reflect poorly on my weakly composed post. My idea of parasitism, in the blog context, is a post that looks at someone else’s original work with a sarcastic eye, without acknowledging the work that went into producing the primary content. You know, what we law professors do to judges all the time.
Elizabeth - June 20, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Oh, Dave, after I posted my comment, I worried that you might think it was a jab at your post-drafting skills. It was not – it was a jab at the fact that I am clearly not in Kansas anymore. As if you were unclear about that matter after my repeated exhibits of my inability to master the technical aspects of blogging, such as trackbacks. . . .
Thank you for explaining how you meant parasitism in this context! I had never even THOUGHT about stealing/snarking as a time- and effort-saving blogging tool. I learn something valuable every day!
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