However, though the inequality is mostly fair now, the system is still young. Once a power law distribution exists, it can take on a certain amount of homeostasis, the tendency of a system to retain its form even against external pressures. Is the weblog world such a system? Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes.I tried to stop writing here once, but it didn't work out -- I feel the urge to write like a sort of building pressure to move my bowels: fear of terrible consequences from holding out. Perhaps my writing doesn't matter much to you, gentle reader, and perhaps I don't care. I'm not sure how to peg that quite yet. Do I only write to inform? Persuade? Do I think that I actually accomplish either? Am I just rambling or ranting for my own sake?
Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day, most of the new readers are adding to the traffic of the top few blogs, while most new blogs are getting below average traffic, a gap that will grow as the weblog world does. It's not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it's harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year. At some point (probably one we've already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term 'blog' will fall into the middle distance, as 'home page' and 'portal' have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning. This will happen when head and tail of the power law distribution become so different that we can't think of J. Random Blogger and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit as doing the same thing.
At the head will be webloggers who join the mainstream media (a phrase which seems to mean "media we've gotten used to.") The transformation here is simple - as a blogger's audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can't link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can't answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.
Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will become conversational. In a world where most bloggers get below average traffic, audience size can't be the only metric for success. LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts. LiveJournal has an edge on most other blogging platforms because it can keep far better track of friend and group relationships, but the rise of general blog tools like Trackback may enable this conversational mode for most blogs.
In between blogs-as-mainstream-media and blogs-as-dinner-conversation will be Blogging Classic, blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship. Because of the continuing growth of the weblog world, more blogs in the future will follow this pattern than today. However, these blogs will be in the minority for both traffic (dwarfed by the mainstream media blogs) and overall number of blogs (outnumbered by the conversational blogs.)
Inequality occurs in large and unconstrained social systems for the same reasons stop-and-go traffic occurs on busy roads, not because it is anyone's goal, but because it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system. The relatively egalitarian distribution of readers in the early years had nothing to do with the nature of weblogs or webloggers. There just weren't enough blogs to have really unequal distributions. Now there are.
You'd never guess how fruitless I admit blogging is, given the amount of time I spend on it, with respect to "inform and persuade" motives. But I do think it's fruitless to be motivated solely by those two things; I think we all know that we listen to people who think like we do and who we consider intelligent: deserving of our time. And we humans have this awful prejudice to paint people as unintelligent whom we disagree with drastically. People with views diametrically opposed to our own may get our ear once in a while, but only if they write great stuff, and still, not nearly so often to learn as to argue/refute what they have to say.
However, I do write for myself, certainly more than for anyone else, given the paucity of feedback I receive on this particular forum, and I think it's undeniable. I get a few comments once in a while, and sometimes I even do something that the "power bloggers" think is worth linking to (check my crème de la crème in the sidebar for examples). But those rare instances account for the majority of my traffic over a given three month period, and 90% of my comments or more. It'simportant to realize how much of your writing is for an "audience" and how much is for you -- for expression, catharsis, improving your writing skills...whatever. And it's important to be realistic about it.
I certainly agree that my wife takes priority over everything else, that staying healthy is tied with my Ph.D. in close second, that running the AAFSA group is a distant third, but should still take huge precedence over blogging...but I spend more time than I mean to with the latter--despite even knowing that the former categories are suffering.
It's in my best interests to get out in the real world and do something. When I started devoting more time to GF, I got letters to the editor published in our campus paper and eventually a media spot: more attention than I would get blogging for 3 years, 3 posts a day of great material. So if I was driven by an audience, I have picked the poorest medium as my highest priority. If you notice, people who run large groups and companies don't tend to waste a lot of time blogging, except where it advances the group or the company -- not fluffy opinion pieces and diary-esque daily introspection. And they get money--so it's not "success" per se, either.
And so all I can conclude is that although the value of this blog is highly subjective, it is highly valued nonetheless. No matter the toll it takes on my free time, it overcompensates in emotional or psychological reward. Maybe I need some kind of echo chamber for my own thoughts, or, like Francis Bacon, perhaps I think reading makes broad men and writing makes them precise (i.e. logical), and so this blog helps me be and stay rational and think clearly. Or maybe I'm full of shit and I really just want an adoring flock of sycophants...
I'm not sure, but I am sure that writing is good for me, and that, despite my best efforts to curtail it, I can't. Not now. Maybe not ever.
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