Last Friday, when we recommended Andrew Sullivan‘s thoughts in praise of blogging, we conceded that not everyone would come away from that article eager to start their own blog. Those reluctant souls have found a new ally in Valleywag correspondent Paul Boutin, who argues in the latest issue of Wired that if you aren’t an insanely popular blogger right now, you’ve already missed the boat.
“A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day,” Boutin warns; your arms, it would seem, are too short to box with the Huffington Post. (Never mind that, strictly speaking, most of their bloggers are just as amateur as you.) If you do start a blog, he adds, the only people likely to read it are the ones who’ll tell you how badly you suck in the comments section—your best blogging option is not to start… and if you have started, quit: “The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.”
This much is true: It is extremely unlikely that your blog will ever become as insanely popular as HuffPo or BoingBoing. And it’s entirely possible that one could promote oneself with a microblog and a social networking presence, both pointing back to a simple home page rather than an ongoing blog. We would counter, though, that very few bloggers need to achieve a Technorati Top 50 level of traffic in order for their site to be successful at the specific mission of making it easier to be discovered by their ideal audience…. and, heck, sometimes it’s just fun to write more than 140 characters at a stretch. The question is, what strategy feels right for you?