The TAS Advice Column
Our inaugural question comes via e-mail from longtime reader and League of Ordinary Gentlemen blogger Freddie de Boer:
I’ve been in this blogging game for a little bit. I’ve had a little bit of success, at least in terms of getting people to read me and to link to me, mostly because of generous bloggy friends linking to me. I’m very happy and grateful to all of them.
However, a link from one particular blogger has eluded me— Matt Yglesias. Yglesias is my favorite blogger, and his blog is the first one I ever read. Now, I’ve tried posting obvious Yglesias bait, and linking to his pieces myself, and even been linked to defending him from the attacks of a blogger who he has linked to. (Got that?) No dice. So what, pray tell, is a young blogger to do?
yours truly,
Freddie
How might a range of blog level celebrities answer?
Richard Florida
The important thing to note is that Matt Yglesias is a quintessential member of the creative class. Were I trying to get his attention, I’d probably begin by blogging about gays and lesbians, ideally from a coffee shop where musicians perform and local artists hang paintings on the wall. The key is to make your blog, The League or Ordinary Gentlemen, a destination for creative people, rather than wasting your time building the site’s content and infrastructure. In my forthcoming book, Who’s Your Blogger, I’ll be developing an index to help with that task.
Ezra Klein
Given the similarities in our career trajectories, I’ve paid pretty close attention to Matt’s blog over the years. It’s tough to predict what insightful, original points he’ll make each day, so better to target the more formulaic filler posts. You’d think the fact that he doesn’t do food blogging would give him time to read white papers from cover to cover, as I do. (How tough can it be to write about basketball?) However, my sense is that often he just relies on the executive summaries. Thus I recommend that you figure out what it is that you want Matt to link, produce a progressive-friendly white paper on that topic, and make sure the relevant excerpt is in the executive summary. If the writing in question can somehow suggest that conservatives harbor retrograde views on race and/or nationality all the better.
Ross Douthat
Perhaps the problem is the frequency with which you post on your blog. Might I recommend that you craft elegant mini-essays whose thoughtfulness and scrupulous balance lend themselves to being the definitive take on a subject? In this fashion, you’ll concentrate all your salient points in one link-worthy place, rather than spreading them out over many posts, none of them worth linking. That isn’t to say that there aren’t certain advantages to writing a lot of posts. On reflection, however, I’ve found that consistently having the most polished, long-considered take on a given topic pays dividends.
Robert Stacy McCain
I’d corner him at the kind of Inside the Beltway social gathering I mock others for attending, exploit his general sense of politeness to snap his photo and pepper him with personal questions I have no business asking, spin whatever information I glean into a salacious attack on his character, bait him into an outraged response that links my post, and afterward claim I was just joking about the whole thing to deflect any residual criticism.
Do you have a question for the TAS advice column? Any topic is fair game! Write conor dot friedersdorf at gmail dot com.
i accused matt of being a closeted homosexual once and he linked. also, maps & charts have worked. one of the big things is to get linked by another blogger matt reads, like andrew sullivan.
— razib · Jul 13, 12:57 AM · #
This is a strange way to have a circle jerk.
— Tony Comstock · Jul 13, 01:16 AM · #
Tony, you give me a question that isn’t bloggy insider and you’ll get celebrity respondents who aren’t bloggers.
What advice do you need?
— Conor Friedersdorf · Jul 13, 01:28 AM · #
How do I get the mildew stains out of my boat’s saloon cushion covers?
Does this Summer’s surfeit of rain having anything to do with my lawn has more clover and fewer dandelions?
Should I pivot the branding of my films towards health/education, or stand my ground on on the idea that they are entertainment?
Speak of, just got our biggest order from Amazon since Xmas? Green shoots?
How come NYC, UCLA and USC are interested in my lecture, but Princeton said “no” the same day I sent my query.
I eagerly await your experts responses!
— Tony Comstock · Jul 13, 01:48 AM · #
So these are parodies, right? If so, you have Klein spot on.
— Klug · Jul 13, 02:02 AM · #
Bloody genius.
For real, that’s some hilarious shit.
— Bend · Jul 13, 02:36 AM · #
Or Freddie could do what Conor does, except from the liberal side. Find something, anything, that conservatives would agree with and then hammer Yglesias with it. It should be accurate and logical and right, but it will probably be such a small point that it’s of little consequence. No matter. The important thing is that you’re right, he’s wrong and you’re a liberal bashing one of his own. You might get some conservative trolls to praise your wisdom, and no doubt some some angry liberals to disagree. If there’s enough traffic, you might get Matt to bite.
Then again, Freddie could just quit trying so hard to please the guy. I’m sure Yglesias can smell a suck up from 400 bandwidths.
— jd · Jul 13, 02:47 AM · #
None of the bloggers would argue that there is more to life then trying to get Yglesias’s attention? Wouldn’t at least one of them say that the right thing to do is just blog in his own style?
Eventually the right people will pick up on his posts, and only then (if Yglesias is worthy of understanding his profound insight) would he then link to it.
I understand the desire to break in, but Yglesias is not the only blogger on the internet.
— Noah · Jul 13, 04:15 AM · #
Satire on the Intertrons always begets the most fascinating answers from commenters, like the bell to our reflexive, psycho-analytical salivation.
— Scott H. Payne · Jul 13, 05:10 AM · #
Scott H. Payne – Ssh! Don’t dispel my faint hope that some comments might themselves be satire as well.
— Matt Frost · Jul 13, 01:51 PM · #
“Don’t dispel my faint hope that some comments might themselves be satire as well.”
Life well lived is a gently satiric dramady, with a faint laugh track included at network executive insistence.
— Tony Comstock · Jul 13, 02:18 PM · #
Every few days the Internet makes me want to have a funeral for subtlety.
— Freddie · Jul 13, 03:20 PM · #
hilarious!
— tim · Jul 13, 03:33 PM · #
Good stuff, Conor.
— E.D. Kain · Jul 13, 05:07 PM · #
Bring out yer dead! BONG Bring out yer dead! BONG
— Scott H. Payne · Jul 13, 06:11 PM · #
And there’s the Yglesias link. Like MAGIC.
— E.D. Kain · Jul 13, 08:05 PM · #
D*mn. I want an Yglesias link too. But am I ready?
— ChrisWWW · Jul 13, 08:33 PM · #
One key omission, Conor
— Robert Stacy McCain · Jul 13, 09:11 PM · #