National bloggers have been posting about the decline in traffic on "liberal" blogs, and the uptick on "conservative" blogs.
This post has a good round-up, including graphs. I have an explanation that has nothing to do with left-wing fatigue, right-wing ascendency or
Barack Obama. My guess is the national decline indicates that some of the audience for political blogging is going local.
For example,
Rochesterturning, which mainly covers local political issues but occasionally discusses national ones, is celebrating its 18-month anniversary. Unless its readers have suddenly gotten an extra few minutes added to their day, I assume some of its traffic growth comes at the expense of national blogs. Other left-leaning blogs have sprung up in New York, including
Room 8 in New York City, and
The Albany Project. There are currently fewer local conservative blogs, and most of them are newer than their liberal counterparts (one example is
Ontario GOP). I assume that local conservative blogs will continue to spring up, and they'll eventually take some traffic from the national conservative blogs.
Speaking of local media, a new, independently-run
town forum has sprung up in Henrietta. In addition to carrying the new posts of former D&C blogger Peter Boulay, the forum also has a section where the
Messenger-Post reporter on the Henrietta beat, Jessica Gaspar, solicits story ideas and asks for feedback. Jessica's availability and responsiveness is in sharp contrast to the beat reporters for the D&C. I've sent a couple of emails to D&C reporters and never gotten an answer.
Comments
Here's my take on this here:
http://ontariogop.blogspot.com/2008/01/is-conservative-blog-readership-o...
Stop pimping your blog, OR. If you've got something to say, say it here in the comments.
My hopeful take is that what we're seeing is movement away from less serious blogs (like DK) to more serious blogs -- like TPM, OpenLeft, and good local blogs like this one.
Let me also add that our traffic at RT is way up in 07 over 06. I hope it is up here too, because this is more substantive than many of the popular national blogs.
I responded to OR in his comments, so I guess I'm pimp-friendly.
I fail to see the pull of the Daily Kos. I think most blogs (this one included) have too much commentary and not enough original material, so I'm very partial to TPM, which is one of the best media sites out there.
Traffic on F29 is up and down depending on what I've got posted. What's interesting is the steady growth in people reading the blog through the RSS feed. But I harbor no illusions that a niche blog like this one will attract a large readership, and that wasn't my intention in the first place.
Exile: The only reason why I didn't just leave a comment here is because this issue was interesting enough to warrant a full post, which was a bit lengthy. And I have no issue with other bloggers leaving links to their posts rather than in my comments section if their replies are also a bit lengthy.
Also, on an unrelated note, but while I have you here, is there a reason why my comments to RT don't get published? I don't want to accuse you of censoring, given that a month ago, when I still moderated my comments, Rottenchester had some issues of posting comments to my blog due to a Blogger glitch, which is why I don't moderate comments anymore to alievate the problem, but I was just wondering.
The Albany Project consists of a bunch of closed minded liberals, afraid to even hear a conservative or moderate voice.
None of my business, I suppose, but I'll weigh in anyway ..
Referring to your own blog post, even providing a link, has always been part of blogging. IMHO, it's perfectly acceptable to "pimp your own blog" if the link provided is relevant to the conversation.
In the era before trackbacks, this was common.
But even today, trackbacks are not reliable and if you have something to contribute to the conversation, there is nothing wrong with making that contribution in the most expedient way possible.
Is Room 8 left-leaning? I thought it was non-partisan. (I just go there for those Lunch Box segments Adam Green does.)
Exile: I thought they were more left than right, but I could be mistaken
Howard, Elmer and OR: This blog is pimp-friendly and open-minded. Accept no substitutes!
OR, what name do you use?
Stuff goes through a moderation filter. It's possible I forgot to moderate it. We got a bunch of profanity recently and yours might have got lost in the mix (I'm assuming yours was clean and so on).
OR -- I see they were just links. We don't let those in unless there's an excerpt.
Exile: That's fine. The next time I leave a comment on your blog, I won't leave a link with my reply. Thanks!
A link is fine...just has to be other stuff too.
We've had a lot of issues with spammers.