Sunday, July 28, 2002

Instapundit, writing the other day about another blogger with a huge following, the fascinating James Lileks. Gives you an idea what kind of pressure readers put these big bloggers under:

LILEKS, as usual, says it best: "As much as I feel guilty about light bleatage, I've always thought that the phrase "blogging will be light today" is akin to saying "the free ice cream cones will be 27 percent smaller today." It's still free ice cream."

Yep. I actually got cautionary emails from people telling me that I'd lose readers (or worse, "market share," as a couple put it) if I didn't post new stuff daily while on vacation. Oh no -- losing non-paying readers! I love this, but it's a hobby, not a job, and the responsibilities that go with it are those that accompany a hobby, not those that accompany a job.I think that most readers realize that -- but some don't. And a lot of the blogger-critics seem to forget that blogs aren't bigshot media operations that claim to cover all the news that's fit to print and to do so (chortle) in an unbiased fashion, but rather personal operations run in someone's spare time, by people who have an axe to grind and plenty of fury to turn the wheel.That blogs often outperform the big guys anyway doesn't change that. It just makes it sweeter.

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