Somewhere I think Steve is smiling at all of this. He's given birth to a giant.
Steve inspired me to become a writer. Howa bout you? Has Steve become the Patron Saint of Online Writers and Bloggers? Have you been inspired to start your own blog because of his example?
this was a perfect post to counter my disappointment (on behalf of steve, mind you, cuz i am a lifelong fuckin' yankees fan) concerning the mets' implosion.
congratulations on a blog beautifully done and on your well-deserved recognition!!
As the time has passed - this blog has taken the mantle from Steve & Jen. If I only have one blog to read in a day - it's here. It's also the first blog opened and last closed in the day.
Thanks for a great site and all your hard work!
I come here because I learn something new every time I read a post, I can get plain old pissed off anywhere (I learn alot about myself mostly). But here I learn and get pissed off. I loved the way Steve wrote (RIP!, with true fire in his belly). He passed the baton to you guys and you are doing it PROUD!
Kia Kaha
(key-ya car-har)
In Maori this means: stay strong/stand tall
I enjoy this blog, but if you don't mind a bit of constructive criticism, I think that the posters should remember "fair use" rules--link and a few paragraphs excerpted.
Sometimes it seems like whole articles, or very nearly whole articles, are posted here. I would hate to see the blog get into trouble over copyright issues.
Congratulations!
In the words of Tony the Tiger this blog is "GRRREEEAT!"
And on an unrelated note:
GO RAIDERS!!!
I think part of the success is that there were a whole lot of people on the Steve Gilliard Train, and it just needed a new Engine. You are all doing the job very nicely, but please give the unforgetable Steve his due.
Thank you all very much, bloggers and commenters, for keeping on keeping on. This is a great community.
Thanks Jen, thanks Steve and good luck to the new Engineers on the way to fame in Bloglandia.
Wherever you are Steve, so sorry about the Mets. I know you said to me last year, "Well, it's the Mets after all, and you gotta believe, and we know being a Mets fan ain't easy." Amen.
I can't believe that you don't have Oliver Willis on your blogroll.
However, the fact that my blog is not on the list is sign of good taste.
With all due respect to you guys (and this blog is a daily must-read for me because you are all fantastic writers), I think it's a bit disingenuous for you to be picking up the Duncan Black Fallacy of "If you were as wonderful writers as we are, you'd have our traffic too."
Are you telling me that people like Driftglass don't have your traffic because he's not as good a writer as you are? I hardly think so.
Don't you think that perhaps....just perhaps....it's because you have a built-in following in Steve Gilliard's readers that has enabled you to rise so quickly, whereas those of us who started up cold are having to build one reader at a time?
Of course if you weren't turning out quality work, you'd lose readership quickly. But the fact is that a lot of us know about this blog because we read the News Blog every day and relied on it.
It isn't attractive when Atrios does this and it isn't when you do it either.
And if you want to call me sour grapes, please be my guest. I'll just go on looking for bloggers whose writing I like but have so far received little love from the rest of the blogosphere and link to them whenever I can. I'll still come here and read, because your work is great. But I'm kind of disappointed that you've gotten this elitist this quickly.
Jill:
You are right, Steve's original community—a damned large one was aching for somewhere to de-camp, post his loss. And when they heard about this place, a bunch of them came by, and never left.
We thank every one of 'em who has. 
I always wanted to blog, but admittedly, it was a daunting idea, considering the quantity and quality of what Steve was doing at the old News Blog every day.
It was frankly, intimidating to me—especially considering all the other stuff I have going on. And then, Steve passed away, and I guess a bunch of us wanted to just sorta keep in touch and maybe...just maybe not quite let the spirit of what he was doing just wisp off into that cold night like steam wafting from a downtown street vent.
Thus, this place.
Jesse wasn't being elitist—trust me. We're not in a position to be, as while we have grown by leaps and bounds since early July, the things that have helped move us along have been certain posts that just kinda for whatever reason, caught fire with people—and as opposed to a lot of links from the big guns of the blogosphere driving us along.
In fact, it has been links from all over the place—lots of blogs we've never heard of before, from up and down and sideways through the so-called rankings. So many times, i've stumbled across a link from someplace that I can't forensically suss out. There's no cookie crumb trail. Somebody just e-mails someone a link, and it goes like that annoying as hell shampoo commercial—“and so on, and so on, and so on—blah-blah-blah...”
Places all over the map, like Bump In The Beltway, Wally Whateley's House Of Horrors, Briiliant At Breakfast and Norwegianity, not to mention Progressive Gold, Walk In Brain, and Lying Media Bastards, just to name a few.
The other thing is even daring to put ourselves out there after Steve. There is a pressure—I admit to it on my part—part of the mix, too. You don't want to come after Steve—and suck. I'd like to think we've done right by his legacy, while being true to ourselves as well.
That pressure NOT to suck is for that reason, immense—above and beyond the internal pride that drives us as writers/journalists/commenators/musers/critics and all thos other proper nouns for people who do the woid thingy.
There's no diss, no snub, no down the nose action here.
The writing matters—big time, as does keeping a kinda anxious audience happy, and treating said audience with respect, and absorbing from that audience. Posts have sprung from comments—and might I add that this site's commenters are something incredibly special.
I built a nice, little spaceship with the Jena 6 “Do You Understand Where You Are” post, but it was the commenters who put the engines in, fueled it up, trucked it over to the gantry and launched it skyward.
There are brilliant, one-act plays buried in that thread...and that's thanks to the readership.
I know Jesse thanked you guys, but let me do the same again. We're getting off the ground here for all manner of reasons—the legacy readers, the new mystery bunch hailing from parts unknown, wonderful fellow bloggers, and of course, you, the commenters...the damn commenters.
Best to you all,
LM
Yes, let me chime in here.
Everything LM said and more...
I really am not going to talk about what we're doing to climb the rankings. I'll do so reluctantly at 5K, and happily at 2K. Precisely because I don't want to sound arrogant about how fast we're moving and also because I could be wrong and I don't want to lead anyone astray.
We are mindful daily, sometimes hour to hour, of Steve. You have no freaking idea. We talk between ourselves, kick shit around, look at what we're doing, and are measured by how Gilly did it.
And yet, we aren't either Steve Gilliard or The News Blog. We're our own operation and if we do what we set out to do, we will end up surpassing Gilly in both rankings and ultimately, in influence on the national discourse. He wouldn't want it any other way. "It is proper for children to grow up, be who they are, and hopefully surpass their parents; none the less the child should honor their parents for giving them life and teaching them how to be."
We receive more new readers coming here from The News Blog site than from anywhere else. The News Blog currently, four months after Steve's death is on the 5K list at Technorati compared to us just breaking on to the 15K list. People link to Gilly all the time.
We also seek out small and unusual blogs to link to from our main page. It's called paying it back.
For example I've been linking to Maggie Jochild's Meta Watershed, a blog which has been linked to a grand total of eight times in it's entire history, and has a ranking of 1,803,855. But both Sara and I think she does beautiful work and I'm intentionally throwing her links from home page about once a week, just to draw attention to what I consider the best new blog I've seen in, well, years. What we don't do is put blogs we don't use all the time on our blogroll. The standards are different, home page links v. blogroll additions/subtractions.
As for building our audience... LM's first major article on racism caught fire in early September when we were at about 37K Technorati. We were on target to get to 30K by the end of September. But in one week we blew all the way down to 25K and then slid down to 20K by Sep 15, what with the Vanessa post. So I remade our target for September to be 15K by the end of the month and we hit it. It wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference if the article hadn't been a home run; we'd simply have gone on to a 30K September, 20K by Halloween, 15K by Dec 1, and 10K by Jan 1. Slower, but we'd have been there. What we're doing is working; I'm just not talking about the details for reasons I've said above.
All of us are very clear of the gift y'all are to us from the jump. Most blogs don't start with a built-in community (at the start, about 750 absolute unique readers) and a built-in referral system (The News Blog, Driftglass, Orcinus and Skippy to name just a few, with "Hey, check these people out" announcements on the front-page of almost all the top 5K progressive blogs.
Then again, as LM points out, that left us from day one, three guys (and later in week 1 or early week 2, three guys and a gal) being measured constantly against an icon. A dead icon. Whom we love, respect and admire. And miss all the time. And talk about and use as our own measuring stick for lots and lots of stuff, not to mention pulling his old posts out on how to run a blog out just to see if we're doing it right. (Oops -- told you we're not talking about that.) None the less, as the first-born child who has always been out on my own, I now have some sense of what it's like to be "The Great Man's son."
Internally, I am driving all of us hard, often right up against where my partners are ready to freaking strangle me, to continue to grow GNB at the limits of what we can handle till we're back up where Steve was, both in Technorati ratings (around 1.5K or less) and readership (50K absolute unique readers). Why?
Because there is a certain sense of "being at home" which will come to all of us when a comment thread routinely draws 30-60 comments and we're being linked to routinely by the top blogs (of whom TNB was and GNB should be one.) Right now -- as is right and proper -- the truly top blogs are mostly hanging out, waiting to see if we have the chops to pull ourselves up to the top rankings, and the writing to make what we say interesting to a broad audience. The two of course, go hand and hand.
I want GNB to be back home, the sooner the better. Home for all of us lies at least at the 1.5K range, as one of the top 20 liberal blogs in the U.S. After that, we shall see. *smiles* Yes, we certainly shall see...
Nothing I said yesterday was intended in any way to negate Gilly or our readers. You're whom we're doing this for. Steve is who showed us the way (and whom we continue to check in with, both in his writings and in our hearts, day by day by day.)
love you all,
Are you telling me that people like Driftglass don't have your traffic because he's not as good a writer as you are? I hardly think so.
Jill -
I'll address your question specifically once I'm ready to talk about how we got GNB to 2K. Which we haven't done yet.
For the record, I think Driftglass is an amazing writer. I look up to him and have for a long time.
I never said all there was to getting traffic was the writing. I said I wasn't going to talk about what it is until GNB hits 2-5K. And that without the writing, it doesn't matter what else you do.
But sure as hell, there's more to it than just writing, promise.
Can't talk about it now. 'Cause I could still be wrong. (Pretty sure I'm not, but I need to have proof, and the only way I can have proof and not prediction, is for GNB to do it.
Then I'll lay it all out for everyone in a series of posts.
Shit... yet another series I've promised. Got to stop that.
The Trust paper (due since July.)
The Chinese Depression post (due since September.)
And this one (not due till next year sometime, thank goodness.)
No more promises about posts till I get the first two done. Yikes.
Jesse: One lesson I'm learning the hard way (over and over and over, and still can't really quite get it perfect) is to NEVER PROMISE a blog post.
I find that the minute I do this -- especially if I set a specific time frame -- that post is dead in the water. Usually, it falls to the bottom of my to-be-blogged list, and sits there until it's just too stale to do, or I no longer give enough of a damn about the topic to write it.
I'm doing a series at Orcinus right now that I first promised back in March. Every time I sat down to blog, that damned promise haunted me. I'm in it now, but even at that I made a sort-of promise to deliver a new segement each weekend....and didn't get one out this past weekend (for reasons that were very good and valid, as you know, but still.).
It's OK -- my readers over there are pretty patient with me -- but still, I suspect you share my weird phobia about promising things and not delivering them. It's a feeling I hate. If you hate it, too, the simple answer is: Don't make promises at all. Let 'em be surprised.
I am learning that SO hard.
Also learning to not promise to go to sleep at any particular time. Although I did go straight home as I said I would.
Thanks for your comments and clarification, guys. I love what you do here and while I don't have any illusions about ever being blogrolled by you, you do great work and it does make not having Gilly around to read anymore easier to deal with.
Except this past Sunday, when his perspective on the Mets was sorely missed.
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