Blogging:

I don’t think anyone here on the Volokh Conspiracy has commented directly on l’affaire Kos, and I don’t mean to start. But Julian Sanchez has a nice piece up about the partial professionalization of the blogosphere.

I know that when I switched from my own blog to this one (which even then had more than ten times the readership, and the readership has grown since then) I… eased up on the light-and-quick posts that might say something off-handed about a serious topic. I still say light-and-quick things about movies, geek culture, coffee, and so on, but less frequently so about matters of political or intellectual substance. As bloggers like Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum turn pro, no doubt they view blogging as a bit less of a game than they used to. As ad money flows into the blogosphere, less of a game still. As political ad money flows in, less still.

Given the sums at stake, candidates are unlikely to abandon the blogosphere, but they will be increasingly sensitive to the risks of being associated with writers who shoot from the hip. That’s understandable enough, but it does make one wonder: Now that it’s possible for bloggers to make it big, will the most ambitious of them reign in the very un-journalistic recklessness that made the form so much fun to begin with? More importantly, will the potential political leverage provided by the link between politicians and bloggers give partisans even more reason to ensure that every molehill grows to Everest-like proportions?

I mentioned a little while ago that every blogger I read on a daily basis is either a full-time professor, a full-time student, or a professional or semiprofessional paid writer or blogger– except, as I noted then, Belle Waring, who as far as I know is none of these. People in all of those categories have at least a bit of extra-blogospheric pressure on what they post, as does anyone who’s ad-dependent. Sometimes that probably means a desirable degree of self-consciousness and self-editing to avoid saying stupid and offensive things. But sometimes, too, it takes some of the play out of blogging.