Hmm. Seems Nick Carr has decided that there's no escape for those in the long tail. He quotes Kent Newsome, who writes:

The number of bloggers competing for attention makes it seem like the blogosphere is a huge, chaotic place. But it only seems that way because we have all ended up in a small room at the end of the hall. When people refuse to converse with me or go out of their way to link around me, it hurts a little. Until I remember that while they aren't listening to me, no one in the real world is listening to them either ...

Don't get me wrong - I enjoy writing. But sometimes it feels vaguely depressing to write something, put it up and wait anxiously for someone to reply via comment or link.

The thing is, it's not one blogosphere. There are the political blogs, like Kos and RedState. They have virtually no interaction with blogs like mine (or even with Carr's, or Scoble's - both of whom sometimes touch on politics). My readership skews heavily into Smalltalkers and people interested in dynamic languages in general - I'm unlikely to attract many die hard C++ fanatics (for that matter, I'm not likely to be reading their stuff either).

Which is not to say that nothing of interest is being said in those places. Blogs attract a niche audience, based on the topics covered by the author(s). That's just the way it is. When I started this blog in 2002, I attracted about 12 pageviews a day, and it went like that for months. I've slowly built up an audience, which has been stable in the 10,000 - 20,000 pageview per day range for awhile now. I didn't get there overnight; heck, I didn't get into the thousands of pageviews until sometime in my third year.

If I had been trying this in a magazine, I'm sure that I would have lost the slot in that first year. The nice thing about the net is that you can take as long as you want to try and build an audience. As well, that audience doesn't need to be huge - if you attract a community of interested readers, that's pretty cool all by itself - and it's something that most people wouldn't have the money to try in print form. So go ahead, and write for your own reasons - if it's interesting, readers will follow.

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