No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Wanker of the day: Duncan Black

Duncan Black (Atrios) writes:

Things Which Make Me Want To Shoot People In The Face:

People who bitch about other peoples' blogrolls who don't even have a blogroll on their main page, but just a link to one.

Well, there is in fact a blogroll, but it's easy to miss because the page design is so horrible, with dark text on a dark background. But Black totally misses the point of the post he links to.

The blogger at Republic of T. is taking an appropriately Buddhist view on the hunger for blog links as a form of attachment to material things. If you start blogging today, unless you're a movie star with a ready-made outlet at the Buffington Ghost, or have the resources of a major PR firm at your beck and call (and the megabucks to pay for it), you are inevitably going to be a C-lister in the blogosphere as a whole. If you aspire to break into the rarified strata of Atrios, Kos & co., you will be disappointed. So you might as well deal with the situation and find other rewards from your blogging.

Like almost everyone else who reads blogs, I skim over Atrios most days, because, well, almost everyone else does. And because you find breaking news stories that the corporatist media won't cover until several days or weeks later, if at all - Purge-gate being a good example. But let's face it, most days Black just phones it in. He has hundreds of people doing the heavy lifting for him, emailing him links, and he just posts the links with a token "Heh-indeedy" or "What Digby said." Don't look to Atrios for any depth of analysis or fresh, thought-provoking perspectives.

Which is fine as far as it goes. But what annoys me about Black is his smug sense of entitlement. He has benefited from first-mover advantage, having started when you could count liberal political blogs on a Simpsons character's hand, and he's never really had to work hard at it. So he gets pissy when it's pointed out to him that A-list status doesn't just fall into anyone else's lap any more.

Do we detect sour grapes, you may reasonably ask. Hell, no! I couldn't survive a link from Atrios - it would blow away my monthly bandwitdh quota in seconds. Besides, I realized long ago that there are far better bloggers than I who are always going to be obscure and known only to a small circle.

My reason for blogging has always been that, living in a backward, reactionary city like Phoenix, I have to vent from time to time in order to preserve my sanity. If anyone else enjoys my writing, that's great. If someone gets their knickers in a knot over it, that's even better. But even if I knew that no-one was ever going to read me again from tomorrow onwards, I think I would still blog. Not only to let off steam but because I do all my own programming and database administration for this blog, and I've learned a lot of technical stuff that I find fascinating in its own right. It's much more interesting applying programming skills to a real project than following along with some "hello world" example from a book. Plus, some of it may even prove useful in my professional life. I've never made a penny from this blog and I don't expect I ever will, but that's beside the point.

As for my own blogroll, granted it's not on the front page, but my contribution to anyone else's traffic is statistically insignificant anyway. But for what it's worth, I don't go with the herd and link to Blog X just because everyone links to it in hopes of crumbs from the table in the form of a return link. I link to people whom I read on a regular basis and who have something original and interesting to say. I do so in no expectation of any quid pro quo.

To sum up, I think this fetish about links from A-listers is silly and childish. There are a lot of whiny-ass titty babies out there - among the A-listers no less than among us peons - and they need to grow up and remember why we blog in the first place. If it isn't because you have something to say and you just have to vent about it, then why even bother?