From Holden:

I generally avoid bloggin about blogging, as it’s been my experience that the most useful product of navel-gazing tends to be lint.

I’m not, however, averse to posting the observations of others and find the lessons historian David Greenberg learned during a week of guest-blogging to be measurably more interesting than bellybutton lint.

How hard could blogging be? You roll out of bed, turn on your computer, scan the headlines, think up some clever analysis while brushing your teeth, type it onto your site and you’re off.

But as I discovered, blogging is no longer for amateurs or the faint of heart. Blogging – if it’s done well – has evolved into an all-consuming art.

[snip]

As I thought about what else to opine about, I started to see that blogging wasn’t as easy as it looked. Who were these people, blogging on other sites, who so confidently tossed about obscure minutiae relating to North Korea’s nuclear program or President Bush’s proposed revisions to Social Security benefits? Where did they find the time? (To say nothing of the readers.)

Serious bloggers, I realized, aggressively report a pet issue, updating their sites throughout the day. They scavenge the Internet for every shard of information on a hot topic, like John R. Bolton’s chances of becoming ambassador to the United Nations or Tom DeLay’s ethical troubles.

[snip]

As I checked other sites for ideas, I now realized that I didn’t need only new information. I needed a gimmick – a motif or a running joke that would keep the blog rolling all week. All of a sudden, I was reading other blogs, not for what they had to say, but for how they said it.

The best bloggers develop hobbyhorses , shticks and catchphrases that they put into wider circulation. Creating your own idiosyncratic set of villains to skewer and theories to promote – while keeping readers interested – requires as much talent as sculpting a magazine feature or a taut op-ed piece.

[snip]

To succeed in blogging you need to understand it’s a craft, with its own tricks of the trade. You need a thick skin. And you must put your life on hold to feed an electronic black hole.