Recently, Slate's tech writer Farhad Manjoo asked me to contribute to a column he was writing on "how to blog." Now that his piece is up (along with lots of useful advice from other folks), I'll post the comments I sent him here, as they'll probably be of use to the various folks who write in asking for blogging guidance:
Figure out where you add value. It's a harsh realization that you probably won't be so much better a writer or political analyst that your opinions on Barack Obama will muscle their way through the chaos and cacophony of the blogosphere -- and that's even truer now, with more blogs and more entrenched voices, than it was in 2003, when I began.So figure out where you add value. Find something specific to follow and follow it deeply. That "something" could be health policy, as it has been for me, or urban policy, or telecom, or congressional procedure, or media structure, or a thousand things I can't name. That's not to say you have to create a niche blog. The specialized posts mix with the generalized posts -- in my case, health wonkery rubs elbows with garden variety political punditry -- and the two cross-subsidize each other. The rigor of the more technical work gives you credibility in the reader's mind and adds weight to the generalist posts. The generalist posts broaden the blog's potential audience and create access points that new readers wouldn't have if you let the blog become a repository of technical commentary.The great comparative advantage of blogs is that we're freed from the essential scarcity of print: Space. Deep content need not fight for pages with broad content, and so you can have the advantages of both. You can go deep without alienating readers and go broad without sacrificing depth.
One sidenote here is that I find the question of "specialization" is interesting. Health care is not the thing I write the most about: Somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of my posts are health care related. During periods of political drama, that number drops further. Far more of my posts are on the Obama administration, and politics more generally. But people define blogs by what they produce that's different from their competitors, not by what they offer that's the same.
