One of the things I was thinking tonight… with my cigar between my fingers contributing to the carbon footprint of global warming… was have blogs eliminated the “Great American Novel” as the aspiration for America’s writers.

For those that blog, I suspect there is a burning desire to put pen to paper. There are blogs of all types out there, on all different types of subjects. I believe that either Alexia or Technorati has estimated that something like 10,000 new blogs a day come on line. While the majority of those blogs don’t last more than three months, the low barriers to entry, and the speed at which one can post, seem to encourage everyone and their brother to just start putting up their musings for all to read.

For many aspiring writers, the “prize” seemed to be having your work published. This prize was boiled down into the notion of being able to be a successful writer, by writing a novel or some other work. My favorite movie on this “dream” was Funny Farm. Chevy Chase quits his job as a sports writer to write “The Great American Novel.” Chevy and his wife, played by Madolyn Smith, buy a small house in “Rural America” somewhere, so he can work on it. It turns out to be a disaster, and in classic Chevy Chase fashion, he runs into a whole host of problems with the town, with his book, and his wife. In the end, his wife becomes a successful child’s book writer writing about the adventures of a squirrel, inspired by a stuffed squirrel she bought at the local antiques shop.

Nowadays, it seems - heck why bother. For about 2 hours of your time, you can set up a free blog and start populating it with content. If you’re any good, you develop a readership over time. Again, since most blogs don’t last more than three months - it’s clear that many people find out for themselves how difficult it is to blog (or write at all) and get people to read it. So they give up.

It is clear, however, that blogging is changing how people think about commentary and even “hard news.” Newspapers are under crushing pressure to provide clear commentary in a cheap format. Most newspapers are going broke - laying off reporters. Publishing companies are also feeling the strain, as books seem to be also going “out of fashion”. All in all - print is under serious stress right now. What Gutenberg did for type - the Internet (and Wordpress) seem to be undoing - but by doing it even more cheaply and expeditiously than the printing press ever could.

There are some good things about this - the amount of blogs out there means that information is becoming more democratized and diffused. In terms of political blogs, I find this very encouraging, as it means that it will be difficult for “one voice” to truly capitalize things.

There are also bad things about this - most bloggers don’t have a fricking clue about the subjects they want to write about. As a result, there is a great deal of bad blogging out there. Moreover, since many bloggers don’t seem to follow much in the way of standards - bad information has the ability to spread like wildfire across the Internet.

As with all technology - eventually the “wild west” phase will end, and the revolution becomes part of the status quo. You can already see this with the conventional media. Websites like Politico are essentially blogs - very sophisticated blogs - but blogs none the less. Washington Post, the New York Times, etc., also have strong blog elements to their online content. Some of my content has been republished in the blog portions of the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and Reuters, for example.

Where will all this lead? I don’t know. Perhaps someday the great writers dream will be to quit your job to do nothing more but smoke cigars out on the porch while opining for the masses….

… that’s my dream.