Blogging
Most blogs are boring, overblown, and don't make a penny
argues the FT, in a longish article about blogging. It suggests that 12,000 page visits a day corresponds to around $1000 to $2000 in annual income if you have adverts, and of course not many blogs get that. That does means this site could get about $10 a year, which makes me seriously consider giving up the day job.
Rather amusingly the article asks many 'well-known' (ie American) bloggers whether they thought Marx or Orwell would have made good bloggers. Everyone agreed about Orwell.
The question was, of course, rigged. The great critic and editor Cyril Connolly fell into despair over the prolixity of Orwell’s wartime writing: “Being Orwell, nothing he wrote is quite without value and unexpected gems keep popping up. But O the boredom of argument without action, politics without power.”Connolly was the constitutional opposite of Orwell - a spry wit given to sloth, a portly bon vivant who masticated away his genius. But he recognised, in effect, how awful Orwell would have been as a blogger, and how he would fall into the kind of dross exemplified by the author’s “In Defence of English Cooking”: “Here are some of the things that I myself have sought for in foreign countries and failed to find. First of all, kippers, Yorkshire pudding, Devonshire cream, muffins and crumpets. Then a list of puddings that would be interminable if I gave it in full: I will pick out for special mention Christmas pudding, treacle tart and apple dumplings. Then an almost equally long list of cakes: for instance, dark plum cake.”
posted by Matthew @ 2/18/2006 11:28:00 AM
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