Stardate 20030530.1608

(On Screen): Online Journalism Review has occasionally paid attention to blogging, usually with a somewhat jaundiced eye. In this article, Mark Glaser talks about the fact that the end of combat in Iraq has deprived a lot of web logs of their primary focus, whether it was pro- or anti- war.

I myself did notice something rather odd about a week after combat ended in Iraq. I was relieved that we finally attacked, and even more relieved that the war was quick and that our military suffered as few casualties as they did in winning it. But I also felt, oddly, a kind of let-down, an emptiness, something missing.

It took me a while to figure it out. I probably should have realized what it was, since it's similar to what I always used to feel at the end of any engineering project. When you've put a couple of years of your life into something, and the project comes to an end, it leaves a gap. That's what I realized I was feeling in this case.

For the last year and a half, I've been actively involved in advocating certain political positions, and doing such little as I could as a citizen to engage in open debate about the fundamental policies my nation should adopt. I came up with an analogy: there was a huge stone block, with lots of ropes connected to it, and I was one of a swarm of people trying to move that block by pulling on the ropes. People were trying to pull it many different ways, and sometimes it moved away from where I and others like me were trying to pull it. But ultimately we did succeed in moving it to where we thought it should be despite the best efforts of others to pull it other directions. My contribution to moving the stone was tiny, but it was a big effort for me, and suddenly it was over. Afterwards I was standing there with aching arms, panting hard, and realizing that I wasn't just sure what I wanted to do next.

Once we attacked in Iraq, and once we won in combat there, this nation was committed to a new path in its foreign policy, and because of that the politics of the world has also been changed. I believe that this change was a good one, but now it's pretty much irreversible. There's still a great deal of uncertainty, but it's at the level of implementation. We're no longer debating what we should do; we're debating how to go about it.

On the other hand, for those of us who have been concentrating heavily on these kinds of basic questions, it does indeed leave us a bit rudderless now, as Glaser's article says. I have no doubt that my readers have noticed the rather eclectic mix of subjects I've been writing about for the last month; that's part of the reason why.

It's had practical effects, too. Glaser quotes John Little, operator of Blogs of War, as having gone from about 100K page views per day before the war to about 4.5K after. My decline hasn't been that precipitous, but there's been one:

That's the number of times the main page was loaded per week since I began collecting that statistic. I don't collect "unique IPs" or anything else; it's just a counter that's incremented each time the main page loads.

The peak was the first week of combat, and I am sure it was due to people visiting more often rather than any actual increase in readers. I suspect that for the first few days some people thought I'd be doing some sort of close reporting of events (such as was done by such sites as The Command Post). When I didn't actually do that, my traffic fell back to about what it had been, and it's been dropping ever since. Here's the daily traffic since the beginning of the year:

You can clearly see that first week of combat as the spike in March. I know I'm not the only one to have noticed this kind of thing; I've seen comments elsewhere about declines in traffic. I'm actually not too worried about it. All I can do is what I have been doing: trying to write about things as it occurs to me to do so, and share them with all of you who have an interest in reading them.

But I do confess that there have been days that I've had to force myself to write, instead of being inspired to do so, and as has always been the case when I do that, the result has sucked to some degree. I'm not going to do that any longer; it's better to maintain quality than quantity, and I'm not breaking any laws if I miss a day now and again.