To Blog or Not to Blog?
(Will Too Many Blogs Dilute Their Impact?)
by Tamara Baker

Jan. 20, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- Blogs have finally been noticed by the mainstream media.

MSNBC has hired both Eric "Altercation" Alterman (from the left) and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds (from the right) to blog for them. Atrios' "Eschaton" blog gained kudos from none other than Paul Krugman for its stellar work in flipping over the rock that is Trent Lott. Blogs are now sprouting up like grass after a rainstorm.

And that's good. Up to a point.

Over at Bare-Knuckles Politics, the formidable Fergy Foont brought up an issue that had been floating, half-formed, at the back of my mind regarding the whole Blog Explosion:

To my way of thinking, blogs are a form of self-flattery, and when their nature is largely political they are a waste of time that could be spent doing something with greater impact.

Blogs were designed largely to be the on-line equivalent of a personal diary, for jotting down personal observations likely to be read only by one's future self and maybe somebody else who inadvertently stumbles onto it and opens it out of a sort of voyeurism.

When one commits one's political opinions and observations to a blog, the blogger's time could be far better spent putting it into a discussion forum or into a letter to an editor or public official.

The point of making such observations public is, well, to bring them to the public's attention. To put them into a blog is a very good way to avoid any reasonable chance that they will come to the attention of any part of the public.

But now that a few blogs have received press attention they've become all the vogue, so I suppose that those whose reaction to faddish trends is enthusiastically to exclaim, "Me, too!" will flock to them and proliferate blogs of their own to render each individual blog even less visible than it would have been were they less ubiquitous.

In other words, we really ought to hang together, lest we all hang separately.

Those words really resonate with me. But I'd like to know what you, the reader, think.

My own opinion: we already have so many blogs out there that, even if you just read the very best of them, you would never find the time to get any sleep, much less go out and do other things (like working for a living, or grass-roots social activism). What happens when there are ten times as many blogs out there? Are most of them just glorified vanity sites? Will they just serve as time-and-energy-sinks, sucking away and dissipating the enthusiasm of the progressive movement before it can do the Bushistas any real damage?

Again, let me know what you think, pro or con.

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