Category: Blogs

Caleb offers some good advice to check your facts, using a recent Guns.com mistake as an example. I haven’t found commercial blogs to be any more thorough in terms of getting facts right than amateur bloggers. If anything, because amateur bloggers link more readily within the community, error is more likely to get pointed out by someone who has the correct facts, noticed and corrected. If your goal is to make money, Google won’t ding you for bad facts or rumor mongering. It may even be beneficial.

In what probably ought to be a good sign that guns have gone mainstream, there’s been a pretty epic change in the gun blogosphere in the past year or so, namely the number of commercial blogs, or blogs that have been created solely for the purpose of making money, has exploded. As an indicator for the gun community, this is a positive sign, but I think it’s largely going to make it impossible for the amateur blogging community to grow, and could likely kill it over time. In other words, if you have an established amateur blog, you’ll probably hold on to your audience, but I’m betting starting a gun blog from scratch these days as a hobbyist is likely to be an exercise is failure, if your goal is to get a reasonable number (say 1000 visits a day) of eyeballs. I think this would be the case even if you’re exceptionally good at blogging. So why do I think this is the case?

Commercial blogs have a strong incentive to be self-referencing and not to link heavily, or at all, if they can help it, to outside sources. Every link you provide to another blog hurts your Google Page Rank and helps that blog’s Google Page Rank. There’s also the common wisdom that it’s good practice to keep people on your side, and not give them paths to stop reading your site and start reading someone else’s. So if you’re a commercial blog, you’re really mostly interested in generating original content, and not getting people into the habit of leaving your site to go read what someone else wrote.

In contrast, amateur blogging, which is what gun blogging has been for most of its history, thrives on the conversation that happens across the whole community, which generally means fairly gratuitous linking when it comes to hot topics. In this type of model, it’s easier for upstarts to get noticed, because if they join in the conversation, even if that means antagonizing the right people, they can carve out a place for themselves within the community. That brings me to the downsides of commercialization for the gun blogging community.

If your goal is to make money, you need a mass market product. To get a mass market product in the Googlesphere, you don’t necessary have to offer great content, or develop strong expertise in anything. You can do well just generating a lot of content and hitting on all the right keywords to draw in an audience. I think, as a community, we’ve benefitted greatly from people being able to carve out niches, and to concentrate on specific areas of knowledge, expertise, or just catering to different audiences. I think we’ve also benefited from the gun bloggers who are also activists in the issue, sharing their experiences. We’ve benefitted greatly from arguing with each other, and pissing each other off. None of these things are smart business, because they limit audiences, but they are pretty important for a community that has to be built on smart activism, and needs to argue about exactly what smart activism is. My fear with the commercialization of gun blogging, is that it will lead to lots of vanilla, mass market products. In other words, that the blogosphere turns into the online equivalent of the gun magazines many of us came here to get away from. While I believe commercialization is a positive sign, over the long run, I’m worried it’ll destroy the community of gun blogs that we’ve come to know.

DISCLAIMER: I am not suggesting that just because you make money that your blog is “commercial.” I’m speaking of blogs which are set up and run specifically with the purpose of generating income or as a business venture. If your ads pay for hosting and beer money, you’re not a commercial blog, you’re a hobbyist. I think it has to do more with why you blog than whether you’re making money at it.

Today is supposed to be a blogger day of silence, to raise awareness of the threats bloggers face to free speech. I am not participating, because being silent to raise awareness seems like a contradiction to me, I’m just really busy today. But consider your awareness raised. People can file lawsuits in an attempt to silence bloggers, then get them arrested when they run across a senile old judge who’s lost his mind.

I’ll be back with some posts in a bit.

I just upgraded our WordPress instance and plugins last night. Normally when I do this, I don’t expect anyone to notice, but it looks like there’s been a significant change to the comment editing plugin. One reader is already having an issue, but it always helps to hear from others if they are as well. It would help me track down the problem, if there is one.

Not many bloggers make it to 9 years. Congrats to Kevin. Kevin’s blog was one of the blogs that was on my RSS feed before I started blogging.

Another podcast interview with the Politics and Guns podcast. We talk about Constitutional Carry, POC states, NICS checks, and mental health prohibitions. I’m a bit more rambly in this interview, but I can get that way when talking about more complex topics.

Looks like Verizon had a regional outage with their FiOS Internet service, so if you couldn’t get to the blog early this morning that’s why.

From Caleb, part 3 of a series. My advice is that if you want to be a gun blogger, to go have your head examined first, because you have to be crazy to do this :)

Wyatt Earp from Support Your Local Gunfighter has taken the plunge on being the latest blogger to go from blogger to author, with a book “Only Son“, which he co-wrote with Pamela Meister. You can buy it now from Create Space, but a Kindle version is in the works.

Time for another tab clearing. I have a quarterly meeting today, and I need to get an expense report in because I put close to 700 dollars worth of equipment on my credit card, and it’s time to get that back. Posting may be light until I’m out of the meeting.

John Richardson takes a look at the astroturf gun control organizations. and compares some of their social media penetration with organizations on our side.

HSUS is once again misleading the public. HSUS is arguably a greater danger to hunting and shooting than MAIG is, as they’ve gotten behind every lead ban initiative out there. They are well funded and have a huge base of people to draw from.

There’s a carry case in Hawaii that’s moving forward. Baker v. Kealoha.

Don’t forget that the NRA Annual Meeting is April 12 -15 in St. Louis. We’ll be there, though we aren’t organizing any blogger stuff this year. We may in the future again, but between switching jobs, etc, it’s just been too busy. You’ll probably see us around though, if you’re another blogger and planning on going.

Stephens Media would seem to be getting stuck with the Righthaven bill. This is just desserts.

Joe has a quote about anti-rights twaddle of the media, and how it’s almost pointless to argue with them. I don’t do take downs of media articles too often these days, largely because there just aren’t as many, and what does appear is just unbelievably ridiculous. I think it’s becoming obvious to everyone the Emperor has no clothes, and probably never did.

Looks like the TSA Nude-o-Scopes don’t even really work that well.

John Richardson takes a look at one Jesuit Priest who is failing to live up to the order’s intellectual rigor.

Clayton thinks Republicans need to stop acting like Democrats.