Andrew Sullivan is going to stop blogging. No, blogging isn’t dead. - The Washington Post: The idea inherent in all of the death knells for blogging is that blogging is any one thing. It's not. As I explain to anyone who will listen to me — an ever-shrinking populace — a "blog" is simply a publishing medium. It's a way to put content on the Internet — usually a fast and, relatively, user-friendly way. But, the conflating a publishing medium with a sort of online writing — opinionated, snarky — that tends to be the preferred approach of many of its users is a mistake.
Back to Smith for a minute. Before he became an Internet kingpin, he and I were colleagues; he blogged about politics at Politico, I did it here. (Depressing!) What Ben did — lots of short hits, breaking news, excerpting from other articles — was totally different than the longer-form analysis I was largely practicing at the time. We both succeeded as "bloggers," but with totally different approaches. (I've come to realize, over time, that Ben's approach to covering political news online was closer to right than mine.)