'Bout Blogs

Mr. Porteno contributes the item of the day. From NYTimes Pogue's Posts, David Pogue interviews blog pioneer the former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox. She's moved on from her gossipy, funny blog and from suck.com to work for Time magazine and develop a book deal (not to say she isn't gossipy or funny anymore). Take a look at the article, some good insight.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/

A few excerpts:

DP: So what are the ingredients then for a successful blog, apart from being entertaining or snarky?

AMC: I think it’s changing. Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.
What I think is changing is that people have now become addicted to the rapid update. You know, the not just 12 times a day; 18 times a day, 24 times a day. And it’s almost physically impossible for one person to do that.
And so I think that we’re probably going to see that the individual, strong-personality blog is not going to be at the forefront, because group blogs are going to be able to do what people expect of blogs better.

DP: Who are the readers of the blogs? Is it just the BlackBerry crowd? The white-collar coasts?

AMC: I think it’s people with time on their hands. People who work at white-collar jobs, have high-bandwidth Internet connections, and aren’t expected to produce, you know, widgets on an hourly basis. I think those are the blogveyers.

DP: Wait till the widget blogs get a hold of these comments.

AMC: Now, I’m not insulting the widget makers. I come from a long, proud line of widget makers. (LAUGHS)

DP: I doubt it. So, blogs are read by this upper–

AMC: Well, they’re read by the opinion-elites, if you want to put it that way. Which means that they get written about disproportionately to how much they affect the world.
But because they get written about, they do wind up affecting the world. So–

DP: It’s self-fulfilling.

AMC: Yeah.

DP: Do you have any big-picture wrapup on the future of blogs?

AMC: I think that the media fascination with it as a force could decline. But, what’s kind of neat or inspiring about the blogosphere is that it’s very American. The idea that someone could enter into a conversation, you know, based just on having an opinion and an argument. And it’s a conversation that includes people who have real power in the world. I mean, that idea is very seductive.