Last Christmas I went to my mate Graham’s flat for the day and had dinner with an Brian,. an American warblogger, although he said he didn’t like the phrase applied to what he does any more. But he definitely blogs from a political perspective. While we were introduced to each other with a “hey, you’re both bloggers!” we found the only blog we both knew about was good ol’ Doc, an exception with proves the rule. Doc’s quite political but has also been involved in the net for a long time (he co-wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, required reading for anyone thinking of making money online).
I, by accident rather than design, was an early adopter of this whole weblogging thing (three years this June) and so those bloggers who I’ve stuck with from the start tend to be techy bloggers, or at least those interesting in web culture and what is now known as “social software”. Brian, on the other hand, got into blogging post Sept 11th, by which stage blogging was more established and the techies were not the dominating voice. Plus he had a mission from the outset for his blog – that it would be political. Early bloggers didn’t have that need for a mission – that it was a weblog was enough. (Brian, sorry if I’ve misrepresented you here – feel free to correct me in the comments)
All this explains something that has been bugging me since I started investigating Brian’s blog world and taking an interested in political blogging. Hardly any of the political blogs have comments systems, or RSS feeds or, as I’m now discovering, Trackback. Even the really big ones like Instapundit are bare bones blogs. In fact I see Instapundit is run on Movable Type which comes with all the bells and whistles by default. That indicates a conscious decision to not have that stuff on the blog
On the other hand, because the blogs I read often bang on about emerging tools and tricks I’ve forced myself to get to grips with them. When every blog you read has an RSS feed you figure you ought to get one too, even though you don’t know what to do with it. And then because you’ve got one you find out what it’s for. At least that’s what I’ve been doing the last year.
What interests me is not that some people adopt these things and some don’t, but that a huge swathe of people who collectively come under the banner “warbloggers” can not be interested in this kinda thing. I understand that they blog with a purpose, and that purpose is not the development of blogging tools, and I understand that blogs tend to exist within circles which overlap onto each other, but all this begs two questions in my mind.
- Does the warblogging community really exist in a completely separate sphere to the rest of the internet? Is it in it’s own “Warblogistan”? Have a look down the blogroll on Instapundit and see how many names or blogs you recognise from blogs you read. Personally, I only recognise two – Doc Searls and Brian. When I look down the blogroll on, say, Linkmachinego I recognise loads, even if I’ve never actually visited them.
- Is the warblogging community not interested in tools that can promote discussions and linkage? Comments are the most glaring omission, but RSS and Trackback, while rather techy, do add a lot to the debate, and debate is what warblogging is all about – what it excels at in fact. If warbloggers were a small minority gang then I’d understand this, but it’s the biggest mainstream application of blogging to date, responsible for getting weblogs noticed by the rest of the media.
These things don’t worry me, but they’re definitely curious. If this is how blogging is going to go mainstream in the future then it shows that there’s definitely a trickle down system in place here. bloggers of my ilk will grab at any emerging technology and see if it’s any good – testing it before it becomes accepted. Other bloggers take what they need – in the warbloggers case a very basic blog – and stick with it in an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kinda way.
I wonder if the Movable Type people should be cautious as they try to establish themselves as the competition to Blogger. Movable Type Pro will offer more bells and whistles than ever before allowing for some quite exciting scenarios, but the mainstream don’t necessarily want that. As Instapundit shows, they just want the bare basics. Perhaps they would do well to release MT lite that does just that.
Hey Pete! How you been, brother? Just getting caught up on some blog reading, so I only now (8 May) saw this post.
Your characterization of my blogging is mostly accuate, except that the term “warblog” meant something very different when I started my blog. The term was coined by Matt Welch (www.mattwelch.com), another LA blogger, pro journalist, and a friend of mine. At the time it described the new movement of political blogs that got rolling in the wake of 9/11 and were focused on the war in Afghanistan and the “war” on terrorism. The majority of the original warbloggers were either conservative or libertarian in their political orientation, but there were a few of us liberals in the mix. Ideological and partisan differences were largely set aside in the early days as we all focused on the issues of the post 9/11 world. Sometime around April of 2002, however, a significant wave of left-liberal bloggers started joining the fray, and they were quick to identify the conservative bloggers as warbloggers, focusing on their support for war in Iraq, and not really appreciating the original spirit of the term. I’ll add that shortly after coining the term, Matt began to regret it, and now that the bombs have started dropping, not even the original bloggers try to use the term for anything other than pro-war bloggers. It is for this reason that I no longer use the term to describe what I try to do with my blog.
With regard to the tech stuff, I can tell you that many of us don’t use comments because we don’t have the time or the energy to deal with the trolls that often infect them. I, as an early liberal in the mix, used to get so much hate mail from wacky right-wing nutjobs that I never even considered using comments. I no longer even read the comments sections of blogs like Little Green Footballs (www.littlegreenfootballs.com) or Eschaton (www.atrios.blogspot.com) for the same reason. Many prominant political bloggers do, however, still use the form.
The trackback and RSS stuff has been gaining popularity recently, but most of use are lucky to be able to get our computers turned on, so the more involved tech stuff is intimidating. Another reason that I think these tools are limited is that we political bloggers tend to operate in published cross-blog debates and direct links to each others sites, and most of our traffic comes from links on each others blogs. I have a small number of direct request regular readers, but will see my traffic multiply exponentially when I get a link from Instapundit, Atrios, or Mickey Kaus.
I am one of the few political bloggers who has permalinks to non-political blogs, and I always look for such links on other blogs. But, alas, most of the political bloggers seem blissfully unaware of the form as it existed before we started our thing. In the early days, InstaPundit used to often link to some of the early, non-political adopters of the form, but obviously the focus has been on the news and punditry recently.
Drop me an e-mail when you get settled back in to your routine. Take care!
B