I’ve watched this presentation by Bug Girl on social media a couple times. The part that intrigues me the most is who she finds her competition to be. And it isn’t other insect bloggers, but rather everything else. She finds other insect bloggers to be her collaborators. And I sort of feel the same way about Washington/Northwest liberal blogs.
In the early days of local blogging, the landscape was pretty bare. Before Slog, before Postman’s blog or the rest of the local media, before Goldy started blogging, it was a threadbare community compared to now. And I made an effort with what little platform I had 2 blogs ago to promote the rest of the community. It grew into something fun and interesting. And even with my 100-150 readers a day at most, I remember having people come up to me at Drinking Liberally or at other blog events and thank me for a link and tell me all the traffic they got out of it.
Some of them have gone, but a lot of them are still part of the community. I hope that the support of this community comes through in the Open Threads where I try to link to a variety of local blogs, even if I unfortunately tend toward the more established ones. Because I really don’t consider them the competition. I love the community both of comments and of other blogs. I don’t know what that means going forward, but I’m going to try to keep it in mind when I write here.
I appreciate the authors spirit of cooperation in supporting competing websites. I have to wonder though if his support is limited to likeminded websites, or if he dares to refer people to websites that may have a conservative tilt. I have alot of respect for somebody (regardless of there politics) who promotes the opposign point of view and helps people to get ALL of the facts.
@1 Your point is taken, but I consider the liberal blogs my online community more than blogs in general. There is a lot of diversity of opinion within that community.