— Virginia Postrel, the Dallas architecture critic who aspires to be the second coming of Ayn Rand, devotes her blog to slogging blogs today:
My challenge to bloggers who think the blogosphere is immensely influential is the same as it has been for months: Oh yeah? Then why isn’t anyone outside the blog world talking about Brink Lindsey’s book? Why hasn’t it been reviewed in the NYT Book Review? Why did The Washington Post kiss it off in one nasty paragraph? Why isn’t Brink on NPR all the time? Why haven’t Time and Newsweek quoted him? It hasn’t even been reviewed in National Review or The Weekly Standard. All these places have plenty of room for far less worthy authors. Check out the full list of reviews here. This is ridiculously scant treatment of a good and thoughtful book, the sort of serious work that public intellectuals are supposed to do.
And in the course of her march to the sea, she trashes Sullivan and Reynolds, and touts her blog hit counts, which aren’t at all impressive (lower than mine, for example.) So why does the poor dear have a burr in her blanket, trashing the blogs and announcing a summer hiatus while she writes her Very Important Book about Aesthetics?
Beats me, but it looks like she’s coming unglued. She’s always struck me as a snob, mainly because of her practice of separating links to “pro” journalists from “merely amateur” bloggers. In the Blogosphere, nobody knows you’re a celebrity, Virginia, we only care about the content of your content. And if yours sucks because you’re busily writing books, that doesn’t make you better than the dude whose blog sucks because he’s mediocre, trendoid and derivative. Write a blog with insight, clarity, effervescence, and wit, and the people will come; beat the same dead horse day after day, and they’ll check out.
The free market of ideas is a harsh mistress, isn’t she?
Editor’s note: As much as Postrel annoys me, I have to admit that she’ no more an elitist, or a dead-horse whipper, than Sullivan; her obsession with cloning and Sullivan’s with Krugman are of a piece. Maybe OCD blogging is a hazard for all Mac fanatics. But maybe not.
UPDATE: Eric Olsen writes a love-letter to Postrel.
Hey, don’t say anything bad about Mac fanatics, man!
Oh my god – not you too!
I worked at Apple, and Sun, too. Apple knows how to make software that regular people can use. And when I worked on TCP/IP at Apple, over a million people would be using it within a year. There are probably millions who still use code I wrote. There are people who still use code I wrote at Sun, but I’ll bet there weren’t a million nodes on the network changed by my code there.
I know this is off topic, so I’ll stop.
Eons ago – at least in internet time – I used to like VP’s site but it became a serious yawnfest quite some time ago. What is it about so many of the “pros” that causes them to become unglued about the whole ‘blogging thing?
Myria
Professional pundits have a severe case of the Emperor’s clothes, apparently, and they can’t stand not being the center of attention. It’s a tough fall for them.
I like John Scalzi’s work a lot – a LOT – but he falls for a really stupid division, too:
(Which I found on Virginia Postrel’s thing). Uhhh – John – I have a job. It pays for my computer and a T1 line. Blogging doesn’t interfere with my work. I blog for fun. I’m sure this is true about most bloggers. I doubt there’s anyone much over 25 out there who “only blog[s]”.
I suspect that she’s concerned about the potential impact of amateurs on those (like her) who write to pay their mortgages. I suspect this because she’s actually said it.
So Postrel thinks the blogs are putting her out of business? No wonder she’s pissed – she’s like Rand’s candlemakers fighting the light bulb.
But that’s progress for you – the only thing to do is let go of the past and embrace the future.
Don’t make me use that word, RB…
Oh heck, I’ll do it myself. My thoughts here.