Geek stuff

John Hawkins is one of the very few "solo" professional bloggers that I know.  Running RightWingNews, he makes his living from that site plus a few others.  A couple of days ago, he ran a depressing post entitled "The Slow, Painful Coming Death of the  Independent, Conservative Blogosphere" and he listed a few reasons why:

• Some established bloggers have quit & fewer are taking their place

• Some sites got big, got big quickly, and partnered with other sites and became real professionally crewed operations.  Thus, they suck up a lot of viewers.  As opposed to the past, new bloggers have an extremely tough time getting eyeballs.

• Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites have peeled off a lot of folks that either used to read blogs or will never visit Right side ones.

• Most bloggers suck at marketing, double dealing themselves a bad hand:

Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20? This is the plight that 99.9% of serious, independent conservative bloggers face. This has already created a lot of attrition and over the next few years, as people realize that their traffic is more likely to slowly, but surely significantly deteriorate rather than explode, you’re going to see a lot more people give up.

So overall, recognizing that enthusiasm can float more boats, he’s a wee bit despondent over the long term future.  At the end of his first post, his advice was Go Big or Go Home. Translation:

If at first you don’t get big enough to go pro, just go home.

My take on this?  Nonsense!  The Blog is Dead – Long Live the Blog!  Reason is, I have a whole ‘nother take on this bloggish stuff from a whole ‘nother viewpoint.

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The interposing of technology over the arts over geo-spatial locations: a community literally and simply of the mind and video.

Back in the 80s, I was a deacon at my church and we had a day-long "getaway" planning meeting to plot the short and mid term direction of the church.  At the time, I was at DEC and was used to the online community there (rather unique, at that time, spanning a world-wide set of folks using tools like VTX, VAXNotes, and email – a precursor to what is now the Internet).  I said at the time the the "Church" would go electronic and virtual, as some of the relationships I had were as tight as some in the real world.  The others of my age pondered that for a moment, and agreed.  Those in their late 50’s and 60s looked at me as if I was some wild-eyed, wild-haired nutcase – "how could that be??" was the reaction.

Now we know better – as it is here and virtually ubiquitous.  And when I saw this on Cafe Hayek, I saw that in another way, that virtual community of which I could not convince the real elders of that physical community, could actually exist and collaborate.

I tracked down the full video: after the jump.  I also include after the jump the next project that Eric Whitacre alluded to at the end of the video above. 

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