Atrios is really a quite good blogger. I think a lot of people forget this, since he is like the weather, and older than dirt in blogging term. Hell, it wasn't even called blogging when I started reading him every day.
He does the smart thing, which is linking to other people's critiques of politics, instead of linking to the original outrage and blowing his top. He is by definition a traffic driver to other people's opinions. He also drive traffic to people he doesn't agree with if their explanation is interesting.
He also admits that sometimes he doesn't have an opinion. That sounds boring, but taken with the previous point he drives people to relevant conversations about things he has no opinion about. If he's not interested in it it doesn't mean it's not interesting to someone, thus, linkage.
Weblogs.com used to have a business model where they injected an adbar at the top of your free webpage. It was annoying to someone like me that runs AdBlock, and has run ad-stripping Squid servers in the past. It irritated me on principle enough(the webpage wouldn't load because it was waiting for the ad) that I "bought out"(pay $29 for the adbar to go away on a weblog page) Atrios' adbar.
Yeah, I'm internet old. And that was my contribution to the beginning of all this modern mess we live with today. Can't really call that a loss or win, but that's what happened back then.
Posted by dglynn at February 28, 2009 05:23 PM | TrackBack