Sunday, July 12, 2009

Liberal Values

Liberal Values

In Their Usual Corners

Posted: 12 Jul 2009 09:21 AM PDT

I’ve expressed reservations about Michael Moore’s upcoming movie on capitalism. My bet is that Moore will have come correct points about failures of capitalism as practiced which led to the financial crisis but he will also stick to his usual political views and fail to appreciate the many benefits of capitalism. The movie will also be attacked from the right–often by people who will stick to their longstanding views that treat capitalism more as a religion and fail to acknowledge any problems.

John Stossel argues that Michael Moore Gets It Wrong.  He falls back on quoting Reason which can be counted on to always cherry pick the facts to show that any problem is always caused by government intervention.

I have little use for those on the left or right who have a knee jerk reaction of defending their long-standing beliefs in such manners while ignoring any facts which show a need to revise their views. Rather than listening to either Moore or Stossel there are some other people I’d recommend here–all conservative or libertarian writers. I’m not saying they are always right, but I respect them for showing a willingness to revise their beliefs based upon the evidence. Such willingness to consider revise one’s views based upon the facts and changing situations also displays an essential component of true liberal thought.

Richard Posner, a long time supporter of the Chicago School, responded to the economic crisis by writing an excellent book, Capitalism in Crisis, which argues that the deregulation of the financial sector he previously supported did contribute to the crisis.

Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan, has written The Next Economics which argues that:

economic theories that may be perfectly valid at one moment in time under one set of circumstances tend to lose validity over time because they are misapplied under different circumstances. Bartlett makes a compelling, historically-based case for large tax increases, once anathema to him and his economic allies.

Stossel argues about this quotation:

The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn’t have enough wealth. They wanted more — a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money.

On one level Stossel is right that this sounds ridiculous. Most people strive do obtain more wealth and you cannot fault the wealthy on this alone. Ultimately Stossel is the one who is ridiculous in stressing the wrong points and instead I would suggest the works of former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips. His books in recent years have shown where the Republicans have gone wrong, including how they have used government to transfer the wealth (and fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money).

The transfer of wealth which Phillips writes about is from the middle class to the ultra-wealthy. Such actions by Republicans  could be used as an example by libertarians of a problem caused by government, but in this case many libertarians back the Republicans on economics and are blind to this. Of course there are exceptions, such as Will Wilkinson who has written, "the great success of the GOP over the last eight years has been to destroy the reputation of free markets and limited government by deploying its rhetoric and then doing the opposite."

Advice For Bloggers

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 09:22 PM PDT

While the blogosphere itself was the major topic of discussion in the blogosphere in response to one post from last week which I commented on here, Felix Salmon gave some additional advice for bloggers on Friday. While discussing reasons for blogging he also warned about the time involved:

It takes up a lot of time, which means that there are significant opportunity costs associated with blogging. If you read a lot of blogs and news outlets anyway, then the marginal extra time commitment can come down, but it's still substantial.

The last part is what makes it possible for many of us to blog. If I counted all the time reading then the time would sound overwhelming. While still time consuming, it takes far less time to write about material you would read regardless of whether you are blogging.

One question for bloggers is the optimal frequency of posting. I agree wtih Felix on this:

As always, there's a trade-off between quantity and quality. Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don't — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn't blog frequently.

Often bloggers are the worst judges of their own work; I can give you hundreds of personal examples of blog entries I thought were really good which disappeared all but unnoticed, and of blog entries I thought were tossed-off throwaways which got enormous traction and distribution. Mostly, blogging is a lottery on the individual-blog-entry level — and if you want to win the lottery, your best chance of doing so is to maximize the number of lottery tickets you buy.

Personally, I'm not very happy about this fact. But it is a fact. And although I might gravitate towards those blogs in my RSS reader which have only one or two unread entries, I know that empirically speaking success in the blogging world is pretty much directly proportional to frequency of output. I thought RSS would change things. It didn't. Ah well. And don't worry about time of day, either: people read blogs at the craziest times, so once it's written just put it up.

Posting several times a day helps build traffic as people are more likely to get in the habit of returning if they believe there will be more material. Receiving links is like a lottery as Felix suggests. Links do not necessarily come to the best blog posts. Sometimes you just get lucky when a larger blog happens to find something in a post and decides to link. Often a post which takes a long time to research and write will receive no links while a brief post which just provides a quick fact receives major links.

Of course blogging is a personal matter. If you only feel like blogging every few days that is your prerogative as long as you don’t mind how this will probably impact readership. Some bloggers do prefer to write one post a day and devote more time to increase its quality. Some of them do develop a following this way, but I suspect it is harder to do.

Comments are a unique aspect of blogs which make them different from opinion columns:

Another necessary quality of any decent conversationalist is that he or she be a good listener. The same goes for blogging — to a very large extent, blogging isn't writing, it's reading. I have hundreds of blogs in my RSS reader, I use Google Alerts and other tools to let me know what other people are saying about me, I spend a lot of time reading my comments, and of course I read lots of other blogs avidly. Blogging, certainly the way I do it, is to a large degree about synthesizing information — connecting this news article here to that blog entry there, putting things into context, and making connections. And so although I produce a lot of content, I consume orders of magnitude more.

I like to say that the main difference between bloggers and professional journalists is that while journalists tend to think of a news article as the end of the journalistic process, bloggers tend to think of a blog entry as the beginning of a conversation…

And another part of being generous: leave comments on your own blog, and on other people's blogs. Doing so is in no way below you.

The discussion in comments can add value to a blog and comments on other blogs can help bring traffic to one’s own blog. Comments are not under the direct control of the blogger as they depend on what others add, but they still must be considered part of the material of a blog and reflect on its overall quality. While some start with the notion that everyone should be allowed to comment freely, bloggers of any size soon learn that it is necessary to weed out both the spammers and the trolls.

An unmoderated comment section can quickly turn into a stream of insults and a shouting match without any coherent discussion. Some bloggers respond by going too far by ending comments altogether, deleting all comments which disagree with them, or limiting comments to a fixed group of like minded people. I would suggest moderation based more on the tone of comments as opposed to restricting disagreement. Definitely beware during political campaigns of those who attack blogs en masse which support a different candidate. Organized attacks of this nature were a particular problem with many of the Ron Paul supporters in 2007 but also occurs to a lesser degree with many other candidates.

Responding to comments also gets back to the issue of time. In earlier blogs before I started this one I would spend far more time debating those with different viewpoints, but ultimately learned this is a poor use of time. This both causes blogging to infringe too much on other matters, and is also not the best use of time allocated to working on a blog. While thousands read a main blog post from RSS readers and syndication, a much smaller number read the comments. While it is worthwhile to spend some time responding in comments, it is a waste of time to engage in lengthy debates. Before getting a paying job as a blogger at The Washington Monthy, Steve Benen ran The Carpetbagger Report. The FAQ includes a sensible policy:

I'm a conservative Republican who disagrees with everything you write. Can I contact you to begin a lengthy debate?

For the love of God, no. I appreciate spirited discourse as much as the next guy, but I'm afraid I'm not looking for a debate opponent right now.

One problem is that such debates never end. Every week there are new people who want to argue that Saddam really did have WMD,  creationism is a sensible alternative to the science of evolution, the scientific consensus on global warming is wrong, abortion is the killing of babies, the Founding Fathers did not really intend for the United States to have separation of church and state,  Barack Obama is not an American citizen, or whatever Fox or Rush Limbaugh is talking about that day is true. It is not worth the time to debate each new person who raises the same arguments, especially as those who hold such beliefs are not likely to change their minds regardless of how strong the facts contradict their views.

I also agree with Felix on this point:

I should mention at this point another one of my slogans: "the object of quality in a blog is not the individual blog entry, it's the blog itself". Every so often some meta-media organization decides that it needs to get with the online world and make bloggers eligible for its prizes. There's invariably an application form of some description, which asks you to present your best blog entries; those blog entries will then be read by the judges to determine which blog is the best.

This is of course ridiculous. There are great bloggers who do little more than link to other people: no one blog entry is worth much at all, but the aggregation and editing function is invaluable.

It is always difficult when asked to provide one blog post for a compilation due to the nature of most blogs. A blog is better judged by the sum of the posts on a topic which will be far better than any individual post. This is especially true when a blog is covering a topic with a series of posts over one or more days.

Another question faced by bloggers is whether to place an entire post in a RSS feed or to use a teaser paragraph to get people to link to your blog. Felix addresses this question:

You're doing this because you want people to read your work. So make that as easy for them as possible. If they want you to email it to them, email it to them. If they want to read it on Seeking Alpha or Huffington Post, then post it there. If they want to read it in their RSS reader, then make sure you publish a full RSS feed. And if someone else flatters you by copying your stuff, be happy, not angry. You're not doing this for the pageviews, you're doing this to be read.

Again I agree. Requiring those who read the RSS feed to click through to read the full post will probably increase traffic but it is more important to be read than to have a higher number of page views. While limiting RSS feeds to teasers will increase the number of page views, others will stop reading the RSS feed at the point where the post ends. They might even drop a blog from a RSS reader if they are not seeing full posts to read.

It is also worthwhile to have posts quoted elsewhere. Of course those doing such quoting should give credit to the original source and link back.

Quote of the Day

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 08:12 PM PDT

Referring to the bizarre story from David Brooks on how he “sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time,” Andrew Sullivan commented: “Mercifully, I avoid dinners with Republican senators. It’s usually far too gay a scene for me.”

Cheney’s Acts: Criminal But Not Surprising

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 06:47 PM PDT

We already found out that the CIA withheld information from Congress. It then comes as no surprise to learn that this was done on the direct orders of Dick Cheney.

The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees "are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity." But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done "to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters."

In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees.

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney's role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general's report underscored the central role of the former vice president's office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency's program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

It would be a mistake to try to move forward while ignoring the crimes of the Bush administration, as Barack Obama would prefer, as this only increases the risk of further criminality on the part of the executive branch in the future. Newsweek reports that Eric Holder might proceed with criminal investigations:

Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. “I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda,” he says. “But that can’t be a part of my decision.”

Changes in the Blogosphere

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 02:34 PM PDT

While traveling last weekend I  lacked the time to post as often as usual and missed some topics. Sarah Palin’s announcement sucked up most of the news last week, but before that there was one other item which was discussed on many blogs. The post attracted considerable attention in the blogosphere because it was a topic of interest to all bloggers–the blogosphere itself.  Laura at 11D discussed the changes in the blogosphere over the past six years and is not happy about many of the changes.

Laura writes that the old A-list bloggers don’t have the same influence as they had in the past:

People used to read the A-list blogs because they were first on the scene to tell us what the hot articles and issues were. But now we get that information from Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader. Does anybody still read Instapundit? Most of the A-List bloggers aren’t all that influential. When I surveyed key journalists about what blogs they read, they rarely pointed to the traditional A-list blogs. They preferred the niche blogs, which brings me to the next topic.

Her next topic is that “If you have a particular expertise and unique perspective, they you can quickly gain a following. Everyone else is out of luck.” I do often suspect that I established my own blog in the nick of time and fear that it would be harder to start a new blog today and achieve even the modest (by old A-list standards) readership I have. If someone is already famous they have a shot at becoming a famous blogger. Otherwise, unless they really have something unique to office, I fear there are just too many blogs, and too many competing sources, to easily get established. Of course as long as a blogger is enjoying what they do it might not matter that it could take a couple years to receive a significant number of readers.

One reason it might be harder for new bloggers is that “Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to.” Part of that is burn out. It takes more time to go through all the small blogs and find those which have a unique and quotable take on a story.The value of links, while helpful, can be overrated. Often a link from an A-list blog will bring in a huge amount of traffic for one day, but what really matters is the readers who stick around as opposed to reading one linked post.

A related problem is that there are fewer places that can drive traffic to the small blogs. The Daou Report, which later become the Salon Blog Report, first under Peter Daou and then under Steve Benen after Peter went to work for the dark side, helped highlight the posts of many small bloggers. This is no longer around but there are still some sources which do this. Sites such as Memeorandum and Megite include links to both large and small blogs discussing a story, but far more traffic goes to the headline stories than small bloggers. Real Clear Politics does provide a handful of links every day to small as well as large bloggers. I also have some additional aggregators listed in the links section.

Laura complains about Huffington Post, complaing that “It has sucked up all the readers. And HuffPo isn’t a proper blog. It is run by people who don’t link to other bloggers and do not get the old ways and norms that greased the system in the old days.” Actually I have on rare occasions received links from writers at Huffington Post. Other times I  have received traffic from links which people have included in their comments. I have no way to know if I receive more traffic thanks to such links or less due to Huffington Post sucking up readers, but I do not see their existence as a problem. She also sees Twitter and Facebook as problems, but while they might be in some ways competition I often receive traffic from people linking to me from both.

I generally agree with Laura’s comments on the problems with Link Monitoring:

In the past, I could easily figure out which blogs had linked to me and then send them a reciprocal link. For whatever reasons, Google Blog and Technorati aren’t picking up the smaller blogs, and I have no idea who’s linking to me.

Neither has been working well lately, but it isn’t simply a matter of missing smaller blogs. For the last few months Technorati has been missing the vast majority of links that I’m aware of, both from large and small blogs. My Technorati ranking has fallen from over 500 to under 200. While some of the sites linking here in the heat of an election year are no longer linking as much, there are also many blogs which I have exchanged links with over the past six months which are not showing up in Technorati at all. Using Google Blog Search has both the problem of many links being missed along with it adding a new link ever time a handful of blogs with links here enter any post.

Besides missing a tremendous number of links, Technorati rankings mean less as counting links from other blogs means far less than in the past. The idea is that the blogs with the most other blogs linking to them are the most influential. This misses the influence of a large number of forums, Facebook pages, Twitter comments, and links from other sources beyond blogs.

Laura notes that “Many of the top bloggers have been absorbed into some other professional enterprise or are burnt.” Ezra Klein (who himself has turned professional at The Washington Post) elaborated further on this further:

The place has professionalized. Talking Points Memo used to be some unemployed writer’s blog. Now it’s a significant media institution. Atrios used to be the only guy articulating a certain set of progressive frustrations with the media. Now he’s a fellow at Media Matters, a well-funded watchdog organization dedicated to tracking the media in excruciating detail. It used to be that people blogged in their spare time. Now kids graduate from college and apply for jobs as bloggers and, sometimes, internships as assistants on blogs.

This could be taken as good or bad by those of us who prefer our day jobs but still like to blog as a hobby. Independent bloggers are at a disadvantage compared to those who have the name of a professional news organization behind them. Being able to blog full time will also result in advantages. This could be a far better blog if it was my main job and not something done quickly throughout the day, but I’m certainly not going to take a pay cut of that nature.

The professionalization of the blogosphere also does help independent bloggers such as myself if you take the view that a rising tide raises all boats. With many of the old bloggers now becoming professional, the status of the entire blogosphere has risen. Independent blogs can be seen as being something of more significance as part of an entire blogosphere which has greater importance. While my readership might be small compared to that of the professional bloggers, I still have near 10,000 readers for many posts when including those reading trough RSS readers, email subscriptions, Kindle, and regular web surfers. Posts which are picked up by Blogburst are seen by far more readers at the web sites of many newspapers and media sites. Distribution through Newstex further increases the influence of the blog (as well as providing a monthly royalty check). Despite all the difficulties in an amature blogger getting noticed among the professionals, this really is not all that bad for a hobby.
Posted by Ricky at 10:02 AM

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)