Tag Archives: blogs

Just kidding. I don’t have time to read it anyway (nor am I all that interested).

In case you’ve missed it, there has been an enormous controversy (by blogosphere standards) over a chapter in Superfreakonomics (to be released tomorrow, I think) on climate change, carbon reduction, and geo-engineering. Brad DeLong has the most coverage (I believe this was his first post; read backwards from there), including links to some people who are supportive of the book. The summary is that a number of people have accused Levitt and Dubner of saying silly things about climate change (bad), accepting an “expert’s” opinion without doing due diligence (more bad), and possibly distorting the opinion of another expert (very bad), with the assumed goal of being contrarian and controversial. Levitt and Dubner disagree. Paul Krugman has some interesting thoughts on the dynamics involved.

This did, however, make me think a little about the difference between blogs and books. [Note: After finishing this post -- which is over 1,300 words -- I realized it is not as interesting as I thought it would be. So feel free to go do something else fun.]

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As every major economics blog has already reported, Brad Setser is walking away from his blog to work for the National Economic Council. Setser’s blog was one of the best at actually providing original information and analysis (data, even) you couldn’t get anyplace else; the only other competitor in that category that springs to mind is Econbrowser. It was the first place I looked when I had a question about the trade deficit, the Chinese-American economic relationship, or foreign currency reserves. We’ll all be worse off as bloggers, hopefully better off as citizens of the United States.

By James Kwak

An old friend of mine asked me for some advice about how to increase readership for his blog. I was going to write him a long email, but I thought if I put it here other people can chime in as well.

The conventional wisdom about how to make your blog successful is “write great content.” Of course, that’s very self-serving for established bloggers to say, since it implies that they write great content. I think Felix Salmon is more accurate: write a lot of content.

Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don’t — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn’t blog frequently. . . .

Mostly, blogging is a lottery on the individual-blog-entry level — and if you want to win the lottery, your best chance of doing so is to maximize the number of lottery tickets you buy.

(Of course, we at The Baseline Scenario don’t follow this rule, but if I had more time I would.) I recommend Felix’s whole post, most of which I agree with. But I’ll add a few thoughts of my own.

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