Wither the Blogosphere?

William Jacobson has noticed that the conservative blogosphere has changed considerably in the past four years, and highlights a lot of changes I’ve noticed too. He links to an article by Robert Stacy McCain on the same topic:

The problem is that if every blogger starts thinking of his own site as a destination, then the site’s value as a portal — directing readers to interesting material elsewhere — is necessarily diminished or eliminated. And if this destination mentality takes hold at all the larger sites, then there will be few opportunities for new bloggers to join the community, and fewer incentives for smaller bloggers to participate in the conversation, because nobody with any significant readership will ever link them. What will eventually happen, in such a scenario, is that the independent blogosphere will wither and die from neglect, and be replaced by a corporate simulacrum.

And this is one root of the problem. There are still plenty of people out there practicing traditional blogging who have big readerships, but the landscape is generally established, and the entrance of commercial players into the field has changed things. The truth is that it would be almost impossible for me to start and establish this blog today if I were starting out now, instead of 2007. If I wanted to be successful in this landscape, I’d have to use different tactics, which I would find unsatisfying and entirely too time consuming. I think it comes down to several factors, as to why it’s difficult:

  • The death of the Pingback, and ability to reliably trace incoming links. You can now do this with Google, but it also catches a lot of junk. Spammers have largely killed our ability to see who’s linking us. This makes it harder to notice new upstarts who are looking to join the conversation.
  • The signal-to-noise ratio in blogging seems to be a lot lower now than it was when I started. When I started, there were fewer blogs, and many of them had pretty reasonable audiences. It was pretty easy to keep track of who was saying what, and joining the conversation was a lot easier.
  • The entrance of commercial blogs and SEO schucksters into the game. These sites have to view themselves as destinations, because that’s how you make money. There are multiple examples of these even in the gun blogosphere, and you know who they are. This is very good for those destination sites, but it’s a horrible thing for the blogging community.

There is also a tendency, when you’ve been blogging for quite some time, to get set in your ways. You get it down to a routine, and to some degree you have to do it that way to save time. I have 2-4 hours a day to spend on blogging. That’s about it. So you combine that with a lower signal-to-noise ratio, and no great way to see who’s saying what out there (because pingbacks and Google alerts are mostly junk from spammers or other ‘noise’), and the result is less linkage, except to the blogs I’ve been reading since before I was blogging, or who started around the same time I did.

I think a lot of people are quick to blame commercial blogging, and while I think that’s a factor, I still put that last for a reason. I think my first and second bullets are a bigger reason blogging as a community is harder now.

UPDATE: I would also note that in the past, blogs have traditionally published traffic stats. This meant that as an upstart blogger, it was relatively easy to see who had the traffic, and who you wanted to pitch to, or to get noticed by. That is also a lot harder these days. It’s very difficult to tell who has the traffic.

Monday Morning News Dump

Greetings everyone. It was a mad weekend, but I’m fortunate to have largely finished my office renovation, and gotten it ready for carpet. I was supposed to be at this place two weeks ago, but this happened. But in the mean time, I’ve been collecting interesting stories.

The New Jersey Second Amendment Society puts in a call to the New Jersey State Police to ask about background checks taking so long. In New Jersey, they’ve never heard of an instant background check.

Joe Manchin: Beating a dead horse.

Lyle shows that deodands are alive and well, despite how enlightened we modern folks think we are.

Executive orders, round two. The Gun Control Act gives the President broad authority to regulate guns and ammunition. If he goes for broke, it will be painful. Also, our opponents are regrouping.

Gun control background checks yield a great many false positives. I agree with Dave that “enforcing current law” against people denied is effective rhetoric, but in practicality NICS gets it wrong much of the time, and even when it’s right, many of those people are no threat to society.

Cuomo is admitting that his drop in the polls is largely because of gun control. But I thought gun control was widely popular?

Anti-Gun Folks: All Talk, No Activism. Migel notes CSGV is irrelevant. I agree. Bloomberg is the number one enemy of the Second Amendment now.

Miguel has an amusing take on Mom’s Demand Action’s latest info graphic.

UPDATE: Forgot one: I had Kevin’s uberpost hidden in my work tabs.

Things Getting Better? Or Further Becoming Two Americas?

While the anti-gun folks weren’t looking: “Fifteen states have enacted laws regarding guns so far this year, more than 80 percent of them increasing gun rights.” h/t Dave Hardy. Of course, this is further division into Two Americas., with the “blue” states getting more anti-gun, and the “red” states getting more pro-gun. Where will Pennsylvania fall? What about the other states that are solidly Democratic, but have a gun tradition? That is the big question. There are examples of bluer states that have remained relatively free in terms of guns, like Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota. But how long will those states hold out with a Democratic Party that’s dedicated to eradicating the Second Amendment? Colorado hasn’t fared so well in its flirtation with going blue from purple. Washington State is not out of the woods either, since it looks like we’re going to be facing a ballot fight there.

Sorry for the Lack of Posting Today

Things at work are busy. In addition to the main project I’ve been working on coming to a header in the next few weeks, as we get closer to final delivery, on the side I’ve been busy layering my wookie suit. I’ve started a Bitcoin mining pool based on a half-baked suggestion from our CEO.

Bitcoin mining is actually quite like real prospecting, only digitally. They are looking for rare hashes; ones with a certain number of runs of zeros (determined by the network), which is unusual mathematically. The network can adjust the required difficulty up and down, depending on how quickly new Bitcoins are being discovered. This is algorithmic, so there’s no “central bank” so to speak, controlling the supply of the “currency.” This is what makes Bitcoins so attractive to the wookie suited among us.

Prospecting involves running through a lot of SHA256 hashes looking for the “valuable” ones. Turns out GPUs are quite adept at doing SHA256 hashing, and since we have quite a bit of GPU processing power hanging around not doing a whole lot, it seemed like a potentially fun experiment, to try to find some of those rare and valuable hashes. I have no idea whether this can earn real cash, or what we could actually buy with Bitcoins, but our company encourages side projects, and this seemed worth learning a bit about (no pun intended).

Fortunately for you guys, the blog server was absolutely pitiful at mining Bitcoins. It has CPU power (which sucks at prospecting) rather than GPU power (which excels at it), so I decided using the blog server’s spare CPU cycles was never going to be worth the electricity it consumed. My workstation is also not so good at mining, even though it has a decent GPU, partly because I think Apple’s OpenCL implementation is craptastic. But a Linux machine with a mid-range ATI Radeon card in it? All your hashes are belong to us.

Long Term Consequences of Ammo Shortages in .22

Clayton Cramer blogged about the possible impact of a copper mine landslide on ammunition production, and that got me thinking about the extended impacts of today’s continued ammunition shortages.

Working with the Friends of NRA program, I’ve met several local instructors for youth shooting programs. Since most of these folks work with new junior shooters, they always start off with .22. I know at least one local Boy Scout camp shooting instructor who seriously questioned their ability to have any kind of shooting program due to the lack of ammunition. This is a long-term problem, folks. Every opportunity we lose to introduce new shooters to safe firearms handling is an opportunity to lost creating another pro-gun voter in the future. At the very least, it’s the loss of someone who likely won’t become hysterical gun policy debates because they at least have some basic understanding of firearms.

I’ve actually thought about getting back into shooting at Sebastian’s club more this year since I largely haven’t shot anything in a good year or more. But then that goes to the issue of not wanting to use up what ammunition we have knowing that we can’t easily get more of it.

A local gun shop is showing their new shipment of 50,000 rounds 5.56 which is already on sale (normally, they wait and put all ammo on sale on Saturday mornings) and even available for up to 10 boxes purchased at a time. Meanwhile, the few boxes of .22 are limited to one box per customer. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the shock of .22 being the high demand caliber of ammunition.

I am thinking about pestering Sebastian to fix my Crosman this year so I can shoot air gun again. A quick search of places that sell pellets actually show specials to get a free tin (or multiple free tins!) of pellets with a purchase. That’s a very refreshing change to see. (For what it’s worth, any air gun billed as “tactical” makes me laugh.)

The Problem of Pennsylvania

This is why the gun control debate isn’t going away in Pennsylvania.

It’s kind of funny that we’re not currently facing any serious threats at the state level, yet Pennsylvania seems to be right on an edge of voting for major gun control supporters.

It doesn’t make me feel any better that some are speculating a MAIG mayor who raised tons of cash for a re-election effort that was abruptly cancelled may turn that into a super PAC fund.

New Technology

We have a new toy in the house. A Samgsung Galaxy Tab 2. This is actually Sebastian, trying to get used to the piddly little keyboard , and setting up WordPress for Bitter. We got this to act as a substitute for a laptop when we go to Houston next week for NRA Annual Meeting . Not a bad toy for the money, when you compare it to the cost of an iPad. I’m still sore Apple end of lifed the iPad 1 two years after I got it.

Live Anti-NRA Protest

Watch as a small group of dirty hippies holds a K-street protest against lobby shops NRA uses. I think they even have a drum. One of them just said “You know, even if I’m on the same side as Bloomberg on this issue, F**k Bloomberg,” while flipping the bird. Even if his allies think he’s insufferable. I’ve seen more people at hanging out at my club on an afternoon.

UPDATE: Protest seems to be over now. They are headed to Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s office. I hope for his staff’s sake they shower first.

UPDATE: Back on now. Looks like they are headed over to Flake’s office.

UPDATE: They want everyone to know “We’re regular people.” Well, so are we, and there are a lot more of us than there are of you.

UPDATE: Just heard one of them say “It would just be easier to beat the shit out of someone,” in regards to someone in a car nearly hitting them because they are crossing streets without paying attention. Why are anti-gun activists so violent?