It’s the end of an era, of sorts, and the beginning of another. Matthew Yglesias, the New York-born, Harvard-educated, District-based, recently-bearded, mid-20s American Prospect contributor and one of the first “famous for DC” bloggers, is removing himself from the three (!) blogs he’s been writing for more than a year now — to write a book and reopen his original site, MatthewYglesias.com. And it’s long overdue.
Yglesias has long been a contributor to his employer’s blog, Tapped, and when Josh Marshall launched his TPM Cafe in early 2005, Yglesias was invited to be the only blogger with his own permanent subdomain. His original site (moved to Typepad) became a repository for discussion about the Washington Wizards, indie rock and his Logan Circle neighborhood.
I was always a bit surprised that Yglesias was willing, let alone able to write for three separate blogs: politics for Tapped, policy for TPM Cafe and whatever he wanted at his personal site. True, he is a full-time writer, he had plenty of co-writers at Tapped, and his Typepad site was published no more often than he chose. Nevertheless, dividing your blogging efforts among multiple sites is a troublesome proposition for several reasons. For one, that’s three times the upkeep to keep up with, not to mention as many as three different content management systems to contend with. While it may bring greater exposure to you, the blogger, it requires too much of your readers. Even if you aren’t spread too thin, they will be. To find your latest insight, they may have to visit three separate sites, and plenty won’t bother. (Myself, I usually settled for the personal site, also being a fan of The Decemberists and Rilo Kiley.)
The disjointed nature of this practice limits the blogger as well: You can’t reference a previous post from another of your sites with too much confidence that a reader will have seen it, so you should probably explain it again, just to be sure, and pedantry is the death of blogging. So is sameness. Most bloggers need a relaunch every year or so to keep things fresh, and Yglesias’ latest transformation will probably serve himself and his readers very well — for another year or so.
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