In the era when print was king and the only way a person would be able to any interaction of any kind with journalists was through the selective letters to the editor. You could fire off a letter to rebut or question something a journalist had written and hope that it actually found its way to the Letters To The Editor page. With blogging that all changed and in my opinion that is one of the great things about the medium. Whether it be in the comments or another blog you can be held accountable for the stuff you write – and this is the way it should be.

Today was such a day as Susan Mernit gave me a well deserved slap about [nw] for my post yesterday [nw] about the reasons bloggers should be thankful for things like FriendFeed and Twitter. While she did say some very nice things about me (thank you for that Susan) she did find one paragraph of the post bothersome and elitist (gasp). The paragraph in question is this one

While blogging has been heralded as the new news medium there are those of the early adopter crowd who have used blogging as a way for them to have conversations but blogging was never meant to be the end point where they would stay. In the meantime though they attracted the most attention and as a result those of us that wanted to make blogging a career had to work even harder to get noticed.

Now I may have unintentionally opened a can of worms here for Susan but she does quite rightly call me to task for what I wrote. She does so with a four part bullet list summary of what the above paragraph implied to her and then follows up with a list of assertions she feels that I am making. I could gloss over the whole with a simple rebuttal paragraph and let it go at that but I don’t think that would be fair to Susan or myself – so I will do my best to add some substance and hopefully clarify what I was trying to get across in the original post.

First off her bullet list summary

• People who started blogging a few years ago (2003 for me) are making it hard for people like Steve to get noticed?
• Non-professional bloggers (like me) should get out of the way of people who want to be professional bloggers (like Steve?)
• and, finally
• Those old folks in the early adopter crowd didn’t really have the committment to keep blogging, unlike Steve who is called to the vocation so deeply he wants to make his living from it?

First off if I gave the impression that I felt that non-professional bloggers should retire or get out of the way of those wanting to make a career out of it nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the best blogs I read and give me the spark to write my thoughts about things are what could be thought of as non-professional. The last thing I would ever want to do is suggest that people like Colin Walker or Alexander van Elsas stop writing.

As for the difficulty in new bloggers who desire to make this a career path it is to a certain extent harder to be heard than when blogging first started. It’s the simple law of numbers – the more there are doing something the harder it is for new voices to be heard. It is no different for blogging than is is for any other profession – that’s just the way it is.

With Susan’s last bullet point above I can see why it might have been fun to take the ego shot but the fact is that the early adopter crowd are well known for chasing the shiny new things that come along. Sure some will still maintain their blogs to a certain degree but most of them will readily admit that the majority of their time is spent with these new toys. Everyone from Robert Scoble and Fred Wilson right through to folks like Jeremiah Owyang have written about this happening. Granted maybe commitment might have been the wrong choice of words but not the wrong thought.

Regarding her second list about the assertions she feels I am making I’ll try and round them all up without sticking my foot in my mouth any worse than Susan feels I have already.

When it comes to the term professional blogger I have to say that the word professional is probably not the best word to use as it has come to have connotations within blogging of being in it for the making money online reasons. As people like Chris Brogan or Doc Searls have proven you can be – for the lack of a better word – a professional and not make a dime from a blog per se. If I was doing this for the AdSense dimes alone I would have quit a long time ago. Now I don’t know what term you would use to describe a person who is willing to sit for hours in a day posting about tech news or opinion and makes a living in some fashion or another from those endeavors but I’m open to suggestions.

As for the bitching – far from it. I totally agree with you that quality can rise to the top in blogging just as it does in any profession. I love it when people like Corvida and Louis Gray come to the forefront the way they have because it gives encouragement to anyone that recognition for good work is recognized no matter the amount of noise there might be out there. Now the last thing through all this that I would want to give the impression of is the silly notion of a clubhouse mentality because that goes against what I believe blogging is about. I welcome and love the free discourse of thoughts and ideas so if I gave the impression of being otherwise I apologize because this is not the case.

Blogging is the one platform that any person regardless of race, sex or beliefs can express their thoughts and ideas from which they can potentially affect large number of people – that is a pretty incredible thing. What FriendFeed and Twitter do is to provide an outlet for folks that find blogging to be too much of a time consumer for the benefits it might bring. From them – early adopters or not – these new mediums are their perfect mediums. As a result for the bloggers that want to stay as career bloggers have another resource to draw on and maybe a little less noise to make their way through.

Oh and Susan - - - thank you.