USA Today has an article about how bloggers are rewriting the rules of journalism. It’s a good article, but I take issue with the claim that political blogs have had the most impact. I agree they’ve had a significant impact, but there are many non-political blogs that have made just a big of an impact. Because they aren’t political, they don’t garner as much attention from the journalist crowd so they don’t appear to have had as much impact. Come to think of it, how do you measure impact anyway?
The mere fact that blogging is being discussed at all is exciting though. Do all the small-time bloggers win a prize if blogging becomes the next big thing? The big-timers don’t need any prizes – they get thousands of dollars when they ask their readers for money. Can you believe two bloggers got $4,000? One got it in 12 hours. Andrew Sullivan got $100,000. I dislike begging for money, but with returns like that it’s tempting.
In elementary school I used to think about getting everyone in the US to give me a dime. Even if I only got half of the population, it would give me over 10 million dollars. It sounded like a fantastic idea to my young mind, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds.
Think of all the coin wrappers you’d need.
How on earth did the bloggers you mentioned get all that money? I don’t remember hearing about them. Was it for a cause, like the Boobiethon, or “just because?”
I’ve been tempted to just throw up a stand alone page asking for people to mail or paypal me a dollar. I wonder if people would actually do it.
One of the guys was asking for help to finance a trip. I believe the others were just asking for money to support their blogging.