"John Althouse Cohen is just sick, sick, sick, sick, sick."

This is what happens if you go ahead and freely express yourself on the internet: If you Google my full name, you'll see this on the second page of results (unless you're logged in to Google, which can affect the results). According to that post, I'm "a gay man" who thinks President Obama "isn't normal" because he's "black." (The fact that I've never said those things is apparently beside the point.) And I'm an example of "the problem of white supremacist's [sic] seriously dangerous mental problems." In conclusion: "John Althouse Cohen is just sick, sick, sick, sick, sick." LOL.

Andrew Sullivan

You've probably seen that Andrew Sullivan plans to retire from blogging soon.

I can't tell you how proud I was when he linked to my post about him for the 10th anniversary of his blog, in 2010.

So many other writers were paying tribute to him that day, and many of them were being more complimentary than I was. He had solicited "toasts and roasts," but they seemed to be mostly the former.

My post lauded him for some things but was quite critical of him in other ways, and I even mentioned that I had stopped reading his blog.

I thought the fact that he would link to a post by an obscure person like me, and even quote the critical parts on his blog, when he had so many more positive posts to choose from that day, really said something about his character.

From my post on his 10th bloggiversary:

Self-righteousness and dogmatism are generally not a perfect fit with foreign policy. Sullivan's style is what it is. It isn't perfect, as even he admits. But he has done far more good than most cheerleaders for the Iraq war by exposing and analyzing his own shortcomings in thinking about war.

But when I think of Sullivan's political voice, I won't think first about foreign policy. I'll think about the issue he showed me how to think about.

His opening remarks about same-sex marriage in that video (back in 1997, before he was a blogger) are dated. He thought Hawaii was soon to be the first state in the US with same-sex marriage; the first such state was Massachusetts in 2004, and Hawaii still doesn't have it. [That was true when I wrote this in 2010; the law recognizing same-sex marriage in Hawaii was signed in 2013. — JAC] He didn't do a great job at predicting the future, but his message still has great resonance today.

I was going to find some choice moment of this video, transcribe it, and quote it here to draw your attention to it. But I would have felt like just transcribing the whole thing. So please, watch the whole thing. To say this is Sullivan at his best would be an understatement.

I love how he starts by giving definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality that seem so uncontroversial as to be hardly worth explaining — and then leverages those definitions into his case for same-sex marriage (both as something that should happen and as the most important front in the gay rights movement).

Though he's often criticized as overly emotional about political issues, he took the political issue he feels the most strongly about in his life and made his case with lucid logic. He did it when it was a lot less popular than it is now, and he did it over and over.

Thank you, Andrew Sullivan. You have made a difference.

(Photo of Andrew Sullivan by Trey Ratcliff.)

Happy 10th bloggiversary to Althouse

Happy 10th birthday to Althouse, the blog of my mom, Ann Althouse.

She's blogged every day since she started the blog on January 14, 2004. As she's pointed out:

I've written . . . on the hardest work days, on the day I wrecked my car, the day I had surgery, the day I drove 1235 miles in one day, and the day I got married.

The blog was originally called Marginalia, before she quickly changed it to her last name. Her first post explained:

I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

She's posted an average of about 10 posts a day, with a total of over 36,000. Out of those tens of thousands, my favorite Althouse post might seem very minor. But to me it shows the essence of her blog. Why? Because if you got 100 bloggers to write a post about that Washington Post editorial, no one else would have written it that way. Most would have been forgettable and abstract, where Althouse was memorable and vivid.

She's blogged about drawing in Amsterdam, things she's never done, the difference between same-sex marriage and polygamy, the problem with "larger meaning," how to teach reading (with follow-ups here and here), gender bias, and her parents meeting in a war.

She's also appeared on video, talking about the Obamas (right before she voted in the 2008 primaries), singlehood, and sexuality.

Her explanation of why she started blogging:

I love writing quickly and openly and . . . I'd spent too much time reading the newspaper passively and without making myself decide what I really thought about various things. I wanted to force myself to take one more step and say something about the stories of the day. I'm not a partisan or an ideologue, so I didn't know automatically. It was only by making myself write a sentence or 2 that I found out what I really thought.

There's a daunting amount of content, about no one clear theme. But is there any theme? I think there is an unstated theme: saying what isn't said. Let's look at what people are saying. Let's stop and think about what they're notably not saying out loud. And let's take it upon ourselves to say it out loud. That's what I call "saying what isn't said," and that's what has always distinguished the Althouse blog from other blogs that are merely effective at saying the right things to please their audience. It's easy to look at what others are saying, pick the statements that appeal to us, and repeat them. We all do that sometimes. But those who do only that are missing something.

(If you want to support Althouse for free, search for stuff on Amazon by using the box at the top of the blog, to the right. Amazon rewards her for the referrals, at no cost to you.)

Blogger of the Day: Andrew Sullivan, The Crusader

This is the first post in a new series: "Blogger of the Day." This will occur at irregular intervals — definitely not every day. With each post, I'll highlight a blogger I like. Some will be obscure enough that I might hope to give them a slight boost in traffic or visibility. Some will be so big that I can't possibly expect to give them any help. The first Blogger of the Day clearly falls into the latter category: Andrew Sullivan. (Wikipedia.)

He’s been blogging daily — on a blog he calls The Daily Dish but which everyone else just calls "Andrew Sullivan" — for exactly 10 years today. Here, he looks back on what he's proud of and "ashamed of" about that decade of blogging.

Today, he's running "Toasts or Roasts": other bloggers say what they like or don't like about his blog. So far, he's posted 16 men — including Dan Savage, Jonah Lehrer, Reihan Salam, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, Marc Ambinder, and Ben Smith -- and 1 woman: my mom, Ann Althouse. She's the only who says anything critical, aside from a few others who blandly mention that they don't always agree with Sullivan. (She also describes how Sullivan's blog was responsible for her marriage.) Without her, it would have been all "Toast" and no "Roast." Good for Sullivan for including my mom's post: he didn't have to do that, but his homepage today would be pretty dull without her contribution. She concludes:

Andrew is always changing, and one could go through cycles of loving or hating him — I especially love the Andrew Sullivan of "The Great Gay Debate" — but it's not really worth getting all exercised about which Andrew Sullivan we're reading today. We keep reading.

Here's my Toast and Roast. But first, some background.

Sullivan was one of the first blogs I read on a regular basis — along with Talking Points Memo, Kausfiles, Instapundit, and Metafilter — circa 2000-2001. It's impressive that they're all still thriving, though you could also say there's a problem here: the blogs that got big early on tend to keep dominating the blogosphere. There isn't the space for some new brilliant person to come along and be a Sullivan or a Kaus or an Instapundit.

Of those 5 blogs, I still read 3 regularly: Kausfiles, Instapundit, and Metafilter. I don't read TPM much because it's no longer the same blog it was in the early 2000s. It used to be the dashed-off daily thoughts of a random journalist who had fled the American Prospect, apparently because he didn't fit neatly with that magazine's liberal orthodoxy. Josh Marshall was the kind of Democrat whose mind was flexible enough that he would praise Bush for his rhetoric in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and offer qualified support for the Iraq war. Today, TPM is a homogeneously liberal super-blog.

And in contrast to my mom's roast/toast to Sullivan, I can't say I always keep reading him no matter how matter how much he changes. The truth is that I don't read Sullivan regularly anymore.

Oh, I'm sure his blog continues to be excellent. But he got too passionately moralistic about every issue — especially when he would flip-flop on foreign policy without bothering to dampen his moralistic fervor.

However, I have to give him credit for recognizing his own failings: he wrote an unblinking mea culpa for supporting the Iraq war. In 2008, to mark 5 years into the war, he wrote that he had committed "four cardinal sins," one of which was "narrow moralism":

I became enamored of my own morality and this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and that unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in anything much but self-righteousness. I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly.

Today, he says his

greatest failure by far in these ten years . . . was giving in to my legitimate but far-too-powerful emotions after 9/11 and cheer-leading for a war in Iraq that remains one of the most disgraceful, disastrous and murderous episodes in the history of American foreign policy. I was wrong - but more than wrong, I was dismissive of those who turned out to be right. Some of those I mocked I did so for the right reasons. But some I didn't listen to when I should have. All I can say is that the great virtue of this blog is that it gave me nowhere to hide. And if you read the archives, you can see my mind and soul twisting slowly in the wind of reality, as illusion after illusion fell from my eyes . . . . In many ways, you forced me. You demanded that I hold myself responsible for my errors and, yes, sins. And we did this together, you and I, in a way that no form of media had achieved before. So in the shame and error, there was some kind of achievement. At its best, that is what blogging can do.

Self-righteousness and dogmatism are generally not a perfect fit with foreign policy. Sullivan's style is what it is. It isn't perfect, as even he admits. But he has done far more good than most cheerleaders for the Iraq war by exposing and analyzing his own shortcomings in thinking about war.

But when I think of Sullivan's political voice, I won't think first about foreign policy. I'll think about the issue he showed me how to think about.



His opening remarks about same-sex marriage in that video (back in 1997, before he was a blogger) are dated. He thought Hawaii was soon to be the first state in the US with same-sex marriage; the first such state was Massachusetts in 2004, and Hawaii still doesn't have it. He didn't do a great job at predicting the future, but his message still has great resonance today.

I was going to find some choice moment of this video, transcribe it, and quote it here to draw your attention to it. But I would have felt like just transcribing the whole thing. So please, watch the whole thing. To say this is Sullivan at his best would be an understatement.

I love how he starts by giving definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality that seem so uncontroversial as to be hardly worth explaining — and then leverages those definitions into his case for same-sex marriage (both as something that should happen and as the most important front in the gay rights movement).

Though he's often criticized as overly emotional about political issues, he took the political issue he feels the most strongly about in his life and made his case with lucid logic. He did it when it was a lot less popular than it is now, and he did it over and over.

Thank you, Andrew Sullivan. You have made a difference.



UPDATE: Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for including this post as one of the "toasts and roasts" on his blog today.


(Photo of Andrew Sullivan by Trey Ratcliff.)

Can you improve your blog comments by using esoteric terminology?

Robin Hanson, the blogger of Overcoming Bias, strongly endorses this idea by Eli Dourado about how to keep a high level of quality in your blog's comments section:

On small blogs, people typically comment when they have something to contribute or ask that is relevant to the post. These are frequently of high quality. … On more popular blogs, this positive commenting dynamic is confounded by the presence of eyeballs. Every post is read by many thousands of people. For the self-involved who could never attract such a large audience on their own, this is an irresistible forum for expounding pet hypotheses, axe-grinding, and generally shouting at or expressing meaningless agreement with the celebrity post-authors.

The first step, therefore, to higher quality comments is “be more niche.” Discourage your marginal readers with technical language, obscure references, and lengthy posts. Your marginal readers are not of high value anyway, and driving them away is an excellent way to improve the average comment of your inframarginal readers.

(I'm going to refer to these as Hanson's views, since I have the impression that Hanson is at least as enthusiastic about them as Dourado is. Overcoming Bias is the more popular of the two blogs, so the point is more relevant to Hanson -- and, indeed, he does seem to put this advice into practice.)

People are rarely as explicitly elitist as Hanson is here, though his reasoning is often used -- at least in other contexts.

I empathize with him in wanting to keep out certain commenters from your blog. (As you know if you've ever posted a comment here and read my notice, I've occasionally had to ban commenters.) But it's an open question how to identify which commenters should be excluded. The most obvious way is to judge the comments as they come in and delete them if they're not the kind of contribution you want. This is more aggressive but also more fine-tuned than what Hanson is describing. His approach is passive-aggressive, but that's not the main problem with it.

The problem is that he presupposes that the people whose comments he and his readers would benefit from reading are those who either already have a certain high-level education (which is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status) or have taken the time to absorb his blog's idiolect. Of course, I just used an esoteric term of art -- it's hard to avoid. But we should reach for these terms only when they allow us to express our thoughts more clearly, not as invisible barriers to keep out a poorly defined group of people we imagine are beneath us.

Colonialism's legacy isn't the most important thing holding Africa back.

So says Nicholas Kristof.

It's very easy to invoke "colonialism" as the root cause of anything that goes wrong in Africa. (An example is the fifth comment in this Metafilter thread about the article on African "un-wars" that I blogged the other day.) I say this is easy because it almost always sounds plausible, and you can make the assertion without knowing much beyond the general fact that there was a lot of colonialism in Africa. Not many people will defend colonialism, and that's fine with me -- but I don't think it's fine to use it as a convenient scapegoat for all the current-day problems in an entire continent. Kristof supports his conclusion by taking a reasoned looked at the actual evidence from developing nations that experienced heavy, light, or no colonialism. Anyone who wants to opine on the effects of colonialism should first look at Kristof's fact-based reasoning.

Although placing all the blame on outsiders who did wrong in the past might feel like a righteously perceptive outlook, this can't be the key to future progress. It's similar to turning every discussion of race in America back to slavery. While it is important to recognize that slavery (aside from its inherent evil) had deleterious consequences that are still with us, it's counterproductive to place all the blame on slavery. If you send a message that a group of people is persistently held back by things someone else did in the distant past, you're denying the current-day people their own agency and capability to solve problems for the future.

What I don't understand about Kristof's blog post, though, is why he doesn't link to his own vividly reported column about a household in Zimbabwe, which that blog post is based on. (See how easy this linking thing is?) You can find the link somewhere on the page, but it's buried deep in the right-hand sidebar. (And I've found by observing the behavior of blog readers that people rarely look at the sidebar.) Basic blogging practices dictate that if your blog post begins, "In my Sunday column . . . ," you need to link to that column. Kristof writes a New York Times blog and has an active Twitter page; surely he's blog-savvy enough to know how to do this, or he has staffers who are supposed to do it for him.

By the way, Kristof notes in that column that the leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, "subjects journalists to imprisonment," so he had to keep his reporting "surreptitious." He risked his liberty to bring us this column; he should promote it as effectively as possible.

Challenging the premise of "the books that have influenced me the most" meme

Ezra Klein challenges the premise of the "books that influenced me" blog meme (which I picked up today), saying books haven't influenced him much:

I've written this sort of thing before. The mainstays on my list are John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," Tom Geoghegan's "Which Side Are You On?," Abraham Joshua Heschel's "Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity," Richard Ben Cramer's "What It Takes" and maybe a handful of others.

But I always feel like a fraud.

These books meant a lot to me, but they were much less influential in my thinking -- particularly in my current thinking -- than a variety of texts that carry consider less physical heft. Years spent reading the Washington Monthly, American Prospect and New Republic transformed me from someone interested in politics into someone interested in policy. So, too, did bloggers like, well, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Tyler Cowen. In fact, Cowen, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma and a variety of other economics bloggers also get credit for familiarizing me with a type of basic economic analysis that's consistently present in my approach to new issues.

Much of my emphasis on the institutions of American government and the processes by which they work (or don't) came from my relationship with Mark Schmitt, first through his blog and then through his editorship at the American Prospect. . . .

So much as I love my favorite books, the biggest influences in my thinking have been the continuous intellectual relationships I've had with blogs, periodicals and other people.

One of the bloggers Klein cites as an influence, Matthew Yglesias, responds:

[I]f I look back at my list of books that influenced my thinking . . . these aren’t books that influenced my thinking “on the issues” the way blog posts and magazine articles do nearly so much as they’re books that influenced my thinking about my thinking. Like: What’s important? What’s it worth doing in life? What questions are a waste of time? What kinds of mistakes have I been making?

I feel like this is going to be the kind of thing books are still important for, simply because they’re more intense experiences. A solo encounter with a major work is a big deal in a way that sporadic engagement with blogs isn’t. Which is just to say that I hope and think digital media will mostly crowd out relatively low-value book-reading experiences and still leave room for some of the big deal reads.

Well, I agree with Yglesias. Klein seems to want to extend his reach as little as possible. Klein, Yglesias, Schmitt, and Drum share similar vocations (journalist-bloggers), and the same time period (right now), and the same country, and mostly similar worldviews (most of them are liberals; Cowen is a moderate libertarian). It may be comforting to draw your influence from this close by, and it hasn't stopped Klein from writing a top-notch blog. But his attitude seems cramped and a bit sad.

It's not that I'm surprised that Klein would have been more influenced by blogs and magazines than by books in writing his Washington Post blog about economic policy. But the question isn't "books that influenced my blog"; it's "books that influenced me." It's important to not just be your blog or your job but to be a complete person. That's hard to do if you're not willing to immerse yourself in worldviews that are far removed from your own.

6 ways blogs are better than nonfiction books

I'm glad someone (Henry Farrell) has finally put into words what's been bothering me for years about nonfiction books (via):

[1.] I would estimate that about 80% of the non-academic non-fiction books that I do not find a complete waste of time ... are at least twice as long as they should be. They make an interesting point, and then they make it again, and again, padding it out with some quasi-relevant examples, and tacking on a conclusion about What It All Means which the author clearly doesn’t believe herself. The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself.

A major defect of nonfiction books is that they're not blogs. (I'm obviously biased in making this statement because I'm not a book author but I am a blogger. On the other hand, I have good reasons for choosing to blog but not to write a book.) Ezra Klein points out one fairly obvious advantage blogs have over books:

[2.] It's possible to follow an issue in real time. People who really wanted to understand the health-care reform conversation were better off reading Jon Cohn's blog than any particular book or magazine. Did those people spend more time reading Jon and less time reading books? Probably. But it was time well spent.

Penelope Trunk's advice to people who want to write a book includes a couple further points, which complement Klein's:

People ask me all the time how they can get a book deal. ... But really, I'm telling you, you probably don't need to write a book. Every time I ask someone why they want to write a book, they have a terrible answer. ...

People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book.

[3.] A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it's too late to change anything.

[4.] Many people think they have a ton of ideas and they are brimming with book possibilities when in fact, most of us have very few new ideas. If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.

To rephrase point 4, a blog is an efficient and flexible test of the richness of a writer's ideas. A book also tests the richness of a writer's ideas, of course, but without the same efficiency and flexibility. A blogger has immense freedom to put out a mishmash of ideas that don't cohere to form a beautifully unified whole but nevertheless contain valuable insights. The author of a nonfiction book, in contrast, has to devote so much time to supporting a single thesis in the same time a blogger could have disseminated 10 (20? 50?) ideas on a variety of loosely related or even unrelated topics.

This tradeoff for the book author may be worth it if the result is the rare nonfiction book that thoroughly supports a ground-breaking thesis and is written lucidly enough to engage the minds of a general audience. (Flow, Stumbling on Happiness, The Moral Animal, In Defense of Food.)

[5.] But even this idealized scenario has another downside: The pressure on a nonfiction-book author to support a single, clear thesis means that the author has a stubborn bias in how they view the world. The author shines a spotlight on the facts that support the thesis, meanwhile sweeping inconvenient facts under the rug. Even the best nonfiction books suffer from this bias. Bloggers are biased too -- no one is objective -- but a blogger is likely to be far less invested in any particular thesis.

Of course, some people who have nothing new to say are going to disregard Penelope Trunk's advice and write nonfiction books anyway. And then what happens? My mom's answer to this question underscores point #1:

[6.] I just paid $25+ for a 300+-page book that was an expansion of an article from The Atlantic. I did that for a Bloggingheads diavlog, and — you'll see when it's up — the author scolded me for skimming. Did that open the door for me to scold her for padding? Readers and writers — we all have our tactics and must guard our own interests. You pad. I skim.

Yet, defenders of books will argue that the internet, with its relentless flood of free content that can be accessed as rapidly and vapidly as flipping channels on TV, diminishes the quality of our reading experience and thought processes. Nicholas Carr, in his widely linked article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," said:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content," we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

Carr is right about the value of not just reading books but "any other act of contemplation." What Carr glosses over is that, in 2010, blogs as well as books can lead to "contemplation" that helps us "make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas." In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, on any given day, more of the thinking being done in the world is spurred by a blog post than by a nonfiction book.

Anyway, who knows? This doesn't have to be a competition. All of the content we're talking about is just human thought expressed in words. We should accept it in whatever form it happens to present itself to us.

Goethe for bloggers

I recently bought Goethe's Maxims and Reflections at the fantastic NYC bookstore Three Lives. I started reading it yesterday morning over breakfast and underlined numerous passages. I was initially concerned that the book -- a posthumously compiled set of aphorisms from the early 19th century -- might seem dry or antiquated, but it's quite the opposite. It has less wit and pithiness than the standard quotations book, but it makes up for this by having more actual insight.

Here are three thoughts I want to keep in mind while blogging:

[N]o one should be silent or give in; we must talk and be up and doing, not in order to vanquish, but so as to keep on the alert; whether with the majority or the minority is a matter of indifference. [#159]

It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth. [#166]

Surely the world is quite full enough of riddles for us not to need to turn the simplest phenomena into riddles too? [#81]

Finally, here's a point that I hope we Americans can appreciate:

No nation attains the power of judgement until it can sit in judgement on itself. [#113]

(To those who might sit in judgment of that spelling: the book was published in the UK.)

As a side note, other people also deserve credit for this wonderful little book: (1) Elisabeth Stopp, who completed the translation shortly before she died and saw it as the crowning achievement of her life, (2) Max Hecker, who compiled the maxims (Goethe jotted them down on scrap paper over the course of decades and used about half of them in other works), and (3) various sources, many of them unknown -- the book euphemistically points out that Goethe would "borrow" other people's aphorisms without including quotation marks or attribution.

My parents are arguing about what the best way to blog is.

"Wild and outrageous" or "finely tuned"?

Blogs vs. "continuous eloquence"

Blaise Pascal said:

Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant.

(Quoted by Ambivablog.)

My initial reaction to this quote was: this is a huge problem with blogging. You can't do consistently eloquent posts while making a large audience want to keep reading on a regular basis.

But then I thought: no, it really explains the problem with books, and blogs are the perfect antidote. Even the best blogs are rarely if ever "continuously eloquent," but that's a good thing.

Blogs put more of a burden on readers to make their own judgments about what's worth reading and where the real truth is. Books and blogs both consist of the same basic substance: human thought expressed in language (with maybe a picture here and there). But only a book seems to beg its audience to revere it as a grand accomplishment. Blogs are criticized as incomplete and lacking in credibility, and it's fine to point out those flaws, but only if we also recognize them as virtues.

People who have a knack for "continuous eloquence" have a dangerous power, because they can lull you into beliefs that have little basis but the eloquence itself.

15 rules of blogging for myself

As I've been blogging this past year, I've slowly been creating a set of private, unwritten rules for myself. With this post, the rules become written and public.

These may or may not be useful to any other bloggers. If they're useful, then great. If they're not, I still like having them down in black and white.

1. Err on the side of putting things in list form.

2. Never describe things as "interesting" or "funny"; just be interesting or funny. Using the word "interesting" is a sure-fire way to make anything boring.

3. Ask: does this really matter? Will people still be interested in reading about it weeks, months, or even years from now? Or do I just feel like blogging it because it seems to be the thing to blog about? There are issues, memes, and YouTube clips popping up every day that have the aura of "This is what everyone is blogging / talking about / linking to right now." Those can be the most attractive things to blog, but they're often the most pointless.

4. Ask: do I have something to add to the discussion of this issue? Or am I just piling on one more link? That doesn't just mean contributing a completely original thought — if you set the bar that high, you probably wouldn't blog very often. But it at least means a way of sharpening the focus on a point that's too often blurry and dull. Or highlighting an intersection of two issues that wouldn't normally seem to have much to do with each other. Penelope Trunk compares this to her brief dabblings with visual art:

[O]ne really cool thing someone taught me is that the color I choose is most interesting where it intersects with another color. Just knowing the right color to use is not the clever, interesting thing. Rather, interesting is when I am unsure what the two colors will do when they interact.

The same is true for writing. The interesting part of writing is not the part of the piece where you know exactly where it's going. The interesting part is when you get to an unplanned moment in a paragraph and you surprise yourself by what you write next. It's the moment of uncertainty, when you have to look inside yourself to keep going, and pull out something you didn't know you had before.

5. Have self-confidence, but with enough modesty and disclaimers that you don't veer into arrogance. Freely admit you don't know much about a certain topic or aren't sure of your position on an issue.

On the other hand, don't let modesty turn into excessive timidity. Some bloggers seem to think that blogging is such a limited form that the most you can sensibly do is to draw attention to someone else's line of thinking and make some bland comment about how it's a "potentially useful line of further inquiry." Boring! If that's all you have to say, why even blog at all?

Blogging is not inherently limited or terse. Anything that can be expressed in an article, lecture, or book can (in theory) be said in a blog post or series of posts. While those other media certainly have some advantages over blogging, every medium has people making rash or bold or outrageous pronouncements without really knowing what they're talking about. Better to have a cacophony of voices making statements that might be shocking or overstated — even ill-informed or poorly thought-out — than to have a murmur of uncertain voices afraid to reach firm conclusions. The former at least invites others to join in and chip away at the clunky misstatements, which makes it more likely that we'll approach the truth.

6. Put a little extra attention into a post to give it a real beginning, middle, and end. For instance, a post should start out by orienting the reader. Too many blog posts, especially if I haven't read the blog before, keep me wondering, "What's this basically about?"

7. It's good to spruce up a post with a photo or video clip. All other things being equal, more people will tend to read your post if it includes visuals, but only use them if they're high-quality and relevant (and, of course, respect the creators' rights).

8. While you should fearlessly state the principles you believe in, try not to hold yourself out as a paragon of these principles. If you have something to say about what it is to live a good life or achieve self-actualization, then by all means write it down — but don't claim that you yourself are living a good life or have achieved self-actualization. First of all, you're probably not the best judge of your own success at these endeavors. But even if you have been successful as you think, that's just not very important for your readers to know about.

9. There are no official rules for blogging — you can do whatever you want. You need to compensate for this underlying anarchy by imposing standards on yourself. Good writing still matters. Write in complete sentences. (Aside from the occasional rhetorical flourish.) Deploy your vocabulary with aplomb. Avoid the passive voice. Write concisely (see Strunk & White) and elegantly (see Joseph W. Williams's Style). Sarcasm and vague allusions are fine in moderation, but don't encrust your writing with so much irony and engima that the astute reader is likely not to understand what you mean.

10. But it's not just about conventionally good writing — there are also writing tricks that are specific to blogging.

For instance, people will pay more attention to your point if it's in a one-sentence paragraph unto itself.

You don't want every paragraph to be just one sentence. That would be too choppy. But err on the side of shorter paragraphs.

Long paragraphs just don't work very well online. I often have to add paragraph breaks when I'm quoting someone because they made their paragraph too long. I don't think I've ever felt the need to remove paragraph breaks in something I was quoting because the paragraphs were too short.

Putting something in bold or italics can be useful to make sure a key point doesn't get lost. But I used to do this too much. You don't want the reader to feel like you don't trust them to figure out what's important. And too much of it just looks messy.

11. There's another blog-writing trick, one I picked up specifically from reading Josh Marshall's posts on Talking Points Memo. He doesn't always use the short-paragraph technique. But he does something similar. His sentences are shorter than most people's. It's not so much that he's better at being concise. It's something more mundane. He's very quick to end a sentence. And then he'll start a new one, often beginning with "and" or "but." When you use a lot of short, declarative sentences in a row, you convey a sense of authority. It says I know what I'm talking about. And it says I'm getting straight to the point. I'm giving it to you straight. Long sentences contain so much text that you can feel like the truth is being hidden amid the verbiage. A short sentence feels more stark and revealing. You can easily overdo this. But it can be effective when used in moderation. And I never get tired of it.

12. Don't link to another blog for the sheer purpose of promoting it. If there's a new blog I like enough to want to promote, then surely it has at least one specific post I can blog about. Not only will this make for a better post on my blog, but it will be better promotion for the other blog.

13. Assume that anything you write will be seen by your family or your employer or your prospective employer or anyone. And once you publish it, it will never go away. (Even if you delete a post or your whole blog someday, search engines can retain caches of the deleted content.)

14. Don't worry about giving your blog a "focus." Write about whatever you want. Let the themes emerge organically, unconsciously, haphazardly.

On the other hand, be aware of how a given post fits in within the whole "web" — not the world-wide web, but the web that is your blog. I like to think that eventually, all the posts here will reveal themselves to be interconnected — to the theoretical reader who takes the trouble to sort out all the connections. Is that realistic? Of course not, but I'm driven by imagining that the blog will get closer and closer to that ideal.

15. If possible, end a post with something that invites the reader to think more about the topic, beyond the surface of what you've written.

What are your personal rules for blogging? Let us know in the comments!

Top 10 posts from a year of blogging

A year ago today, I took a walk to Mother's in Austin and wrote in a Moleskine notebook over breakfast (probably migas and coffee). When I was done, I walked back home, typed up what I'd written, and published it to the world:

First post

So, I've started a blog...

I want the blog to be personal. ... Does "personal" mean a blog that's obsessively self-centered and introspective, confirming all those critics of blogs as internet-powered narcissism? I certainly hope so. I'll do my best...

I want this to be a leisurely, contemplative blog, not a "Here's what's going on this second" blog. There's probably a greater excess of content in the world right now than at any previous point in history. We have a glut of content but a dearth of thought. I'm trying to correct the balance.

And as you can see from that statement, I'm also trying to avoid the false modesty that's rampant on the blogosphere. So many blogs pitch themselves as "random babblings" or "incoherent rants." Why all the self-deprecation? Anyway, I'll have none of that here! I either want to do this well or not do it all.

And now, in the spirit of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement heralded by that first post, here are my top 10 posts from a year of blogging. "Top 10" may be a misnomer, since this isn't necessarily "the best of Jaltcoh" -- I'll leave it to others to judge their actual merit. But here are the ones I find most worth going back to:

1. What are the disadvantages of being male?

2. Thank you, Tim Russert (1950-2008)

3. The top 40 grunge songs -- 40-36, 35-31, 30-26, 25-21, 20-16, 15-11, 10-6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, the end.

4. The death penalty -- does it saves lives, and if so, should liberals support it? -- post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4

5. The top 120 moments on the path to the White House -- post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4

6. Live-blogging the 2008 debates -- post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4

7. Imogen Heap - Beauty in the breakdown

8. The problem of evil -- post 1, post 2

9. How to write a New York Times article to make it seem like women work harder than men

10. Michel Petrucciani, 1962-1999

I ended that first post in mid-air: "Let's see how it goes..." So, how did it go?

In the last year, I've posted 265 posts, been linked at least 217 times, and had about 108,000 visitors.

Thanks for this goes, above all, to my mom (Ann Althouse) and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit). Of course, the full thanks would go to more people than I can keep track of -- everyone who's followed the blog, commented, linked, and given feedback. This includes LemmusLemmus (Church of Rationality), Summer Anne Burton (Boingy Boingy), Jeff (Stuff Running 'Round My Head), Zachary Paul Sire (Sire Says), Stubborn Facts, my girlfriend (Danielle Pouliot), and my dad (Richard Lawrence Cohen).

Thanks to everyone for reading, thinking about, adding to, and arguing with what's on my mind when I'm typing on my MacBook or writing in a Moleskine at a cafe. I hope to keep going for at least a few more years.

"Commoner Captures Princess, Blog Version"

Uh, wow.

UPDATE: Annotated.

Words of wisdom on blogging -- newness and negativity

1. "Interesting is a much better filter than new."

That's from Jason Kottke on Twitter. He writes the blog called Kottke, which might be the oldest blog of any note (started in March 1998) that's still thriving today.

There seems to be an unwritten rule of blogging that you need to post about something as soon as it emerges as the issue of the day. It's looked down on if you blog about it a week later, or you'll at least need to excuse it with an apology ("I'm sorry I'm late to this, but I just noticed it, and..."). Blogging about a story that's a month old is unthinkable.

For instance, this post on Reason magazine's blog Hit & Run links to a segment from 60 Minutes, but the blogger seems to feel apologetic for doing so:

[This video] aired a couple of weeks ago, but it's a pretty good look at the drinking age debate, with lots of camera time for Amethyst Initiative founder John McCardell. [emphasis added]

"But" it's a pretty good look at the drinking age debate? Why not "and"? Did the debate over the legal drinking age really change at all in the few weeks since the 60 minutes segment aired?

I know it's petty to pick on this one person's word choice, but it's symptomatic of a general problem in blogging. Sure there'll be an issue here and there that's so timely it only really makes sense to blog it right away. But don't most things worth talking about stay interesting for a while?

If something that's a couple weeks "old" is too out of date for you, you certainly wouldn't have much interest in, say, reading a book.

So I plan to keep breaking this unwritten rule of the blogosphere; that is, I'll blog something that doesn't cross the "new" threshold as long as it crosses the "interesting" threshold. Even a subject that's centuries old isn't off limits; a fortiori, it's OK to blog something from last year.


2. "People get a hit of energy when they are negative about something."

That's from Gwyneth Paltrow in an interview, in response to a question about her blog.

That explains a lot about blogging in general, and especially comments sections on blogs.


UPDATE: I just noticed that this was my 250th post. A quarter of the way to 1,000!

One more reason to blog: something to live for

Zachary Paul Sire -- whose blog Sire Says is great because he links to me in his blogroll -- has been blogging from the hospital:

I see Althouse has a post up referencing this post, and her thoughtful words got me thinking about why I whipped out my camera phone in the ER.

Well, I really did think I was going to die. The doctor told me I had a ruptured spleen and was bleeding internally, but then he walked away and said he'd "back in a few." The hell?! How can you say that and just walk away?

Anyway, as freaked out as I was, the one thing that made me happy (I laughed out loud as I was doing it, actually) was to take out my phone and start taking pictures of myself, knowing that this was bloggable material. And if I told myself that I would have something interesting to blog about, that I had something to look forward to, and that I still had something to write, then there was absolutely no reason to die.

That's as important as blogging for a good career, right?

Last weekend on my blog

That's what an Instapundit link will do.

(Graphic and data from StatCounter.)

Bloglar!

"Bloglar" is a word I just coined. It means a blog burglar.

Huh? What am I talking about?! What's a blog burglar?

Here's what I'm talking about:

If "the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own," then what the hell is this? Lady, you are on Matt's blog! How did you get there? Did you just barge in like some burglar in the night?

Click the link for the whole story.

I repeatedly blog about Eliot Spitzer without having much of an opinion about him one way or the other.

So, my previous post was just blogged by my mom. Typical thing that happens with blogging: I'm suddenly exposed to potentially hundreds of people as someone who's taking a strong stand about the need to get Eliot Spitzer back into power -- which is weird, since I essentially have no actual opinion about him.

On top of that, this wasn't the first time I've blogged about Spitzer. My mom posted this post in the aftermath of the Spitzer scandal based on my point (which she credited me for) about how Spitzer's record of prosecuting prostitution cases might actually explain his behavior. I also suggested the title of that post:

From penetrating the world of prostitution to penetrating the prostitute.

It makes sense -- read the post!

Speaking of Spitzer and prostitution, my mom added this commentary to my post about getting Spitzer into the Senate to replace Hillary Clinton if she becomes Secretary of State:

I know. I know. It's not just adultery. It's prostitutes. And hypocrisy. But they're all hypocrites, and there will always be prostitutes...

Of course, it's true there was prostitution and hypocrisy involved. But unless you think all politicians who have affairs should be banished from public life, then I don't see the relevance.

It's easy to say, "Oh, it wasn't the adultery itself -- it was all the other stuff." But isn't just about any adultery going to look extra lurid if you look at the specifics of what happened? Think about the most notable political adulterers in the U.S. who've been discovered in the past 10 or 15 years: Clinton, Edwards, Gingrich, Giuliani, McCain. None of them just had a generic one-night stand and then went back to their normal lives. No, in each case, there was layer upon layer of sleaze. Lying, hypocrisy, sex with subordinates, cheating on a terminally ill or seriously injured spouse, questions about whether taxpayers foot the bill for any of it, and countless other disgusting details I'm happy to have forgotten (and a few I wish I could forget).

In fact, out of all the ones I've named, couldn't you argue that Spitzer's adultery was the most innocuous? At least he kept it "professional" and didn't drag another person's whole emotional life into it.

To be clear, I'm not trying to defend any of that behavior. It was all profoundly immoral because of the consequences for the families involved. But should it have consequences for me or you as American citizens? I don't think so. Tragically, adultery is so common that barring adulterers from public service is just not a good plan.

"I hate hate hate hate the new SiteMeter."

ALERT: This blog post is now outdated -- see "UPDATE #3" below.

--

That's my mom's reaction to SiteMeter's revamped website, which debuted today. And I fully agree.

For those who don't know, SiteMeter is the website you get to if you click the little icon at the very bottom of the right-hand sidebar of this blog. It's the most popular service for giving people information about their website's traffic.

Or I should say, it was the most popular such service. I have to assume everyone will desert it now. And I just have a free account; as for the paying users, I can't imagine they'd want to actually spend money on this.

If you search for "sitemeter" on Google Blog Search right now, you get blogger after blogger complaining about the redesign. A representative sample of blog post titles:

I Hate The New Sitemeter

Bye-bye SiteMeter

The New Sitemeter is much much worse

New Sitemeter Really Sucks

They've ruined SiteMeter

The new Sitemeter is useless

Grrrr!

A lot of people are saying the main new feature they'd like to see is an option to use the old design.

This blogger is immediately setting to work on programming a new traffic-tracking site for his wife's blog. He says:

My wife loves looking through the SiteMeter stats on her blog.... Today she was frustrated to find she can no longer access those stats. SiteMeter redid their user interface for free accounts, so that it is very difficult to actually access the stats. I waded through it for a while trying to find the stats, and someone as computer illiterate as my wife would never find it.

So, I told I'd have to build her a traffic meter. She jumped in glee that I'd be able to do that....

In the mean time SiteMeter will be gone since if the stats are unreadable, it's of no real purpose anymore.

Of course, that last sentence is what it's all about. SiteMeter seems to have failed to realize the purpose of their own website -- they were too distracted by frills, toys, gizmos, gimmicks.

I'm not seeing any positive comments from bloggers.

Well, I have seen an occasional comment along the lines of "Yes, it's prettier, but it's harder to use." But that's wrong! It's not prettier. It's a lot fancier. But that's not the same thing. The old version was a classic example of a basic, well-functioning website. It wasn't beautiful, but at least it was simple, and simplicity counts for a lot. The redesign has no focus. There are no orderly visual motifs that organize the information in a way that helps you understand what's being presented to you.

The type is extremely small, bordering on unreadable, and it can't be enlarged. It's like they didn't test this out on anyone before they launched it.

On top of all that, everything is slower (presumably because it now uses Flash). I'd be fine with that if it were a trade-off for real features. But the redesigned SiteMeter doesn't have "features" in the sense of "things you'd want to use."

I can't believe there are people who actually got paid to create this redesign and recommend implementing it. Why wasn't there anyone in charge who stepped in and said, "Wait, we can't do this -- it's just not good enough"?

What a huge mistake.

Time to figure out Google Analytics ...


UPDATE #1:

A commenter over at my mom's site has some insight into the "What were they thinking?" question:

This type of change is the sign of a program manager trying to justify his salary. I've been seeing it all the time at the software companies I work at.

Note that by putting it into Flash, the program manager makes this content inaccessible to people with visual acuity issues. But hey, pretty colors! ...

Truly, young software developers are the most selfish and self-absorbed people in the world.

And this other commenter sums up the whole thing as concisely as possible:

The New Coke of websites!

UPDATE #2:

I've added StatCounter. (Thanks to the commenter on my mom's blog who recommended it.)

You can see the StatCounter near the top of the sidebar of this blog. (If it's not there when you're reading this, check the very bottom of the screen -- I might move it later.)

I've just spent a few minutes browsing some of the features, and I'm tentatively convinced that StatCounter is even better than the old SiteMeter design, and a fortiori better than the new-and-destroyed SiteMeter. For instance, you can see the total percentages of how much traffic you're getting from each search term and referring site, whereas SiteMeter gives this info only to those with paid accounts; if you have a free SiteMeter account, you can also see those data, but only listed individually for each visitor rather than aggregated into percentages.

Again, that's just something I've noticed in the first few minutes -- I'll report back later on how I ended up liking StatCounter. But I have no doubt that it's better than the new SiteMeter.


UPDATE #3:

Well, SiteMeter listened to us! They're changing it back.

They "apologize for the botched rollout," and they claim that future redesigns will be done smoothly.

But wow, I've never lost total confidence in a website so suddenly. I wonder whether most SiteMeter users will accept the quick correction to the problem, or whether this has permanently undermined their confidence in SiteMeter.

In my case, that won't matter, though, because SiteMeter has given me an excuse to check out competing sites by so thoroughly screwing up their own site. And it seems pretty clear that StatCounter, not SiteMeter, is the way to go. I mentioned some of its advantages over SiteMeter in the previous update. The statistics are comprehensive and aggregated instead of just piecemeal, though you still have the option to see the piecemeal data if you want. I also see that the free account shows you the past 500 visitors, which is 5 times as many as SiteMeter shows. [CORRECTION: I believe StatCounter just shows you the past 500 pageviews, not visitors -- so that's slightly less than I thought, but still much better than SiteMeter.]

So as of today, you'll only be seeing the StatCounter counter on this blog, not the SiteMeter -- thanks to SiteMeter!