Wither this blog?

David Sirota has linked to one of my blog entries, which makes me an official, if marginal, member of the blogger community.

Can I hope for this blog to ever become non-marginal? I must admit that the prognosis doesn't look that good. A few problems:

1. I am not a fast writer. I think that the quality of my prose is decent, if unexceptional, but I have this unfortunate tendency to struggle over wording. A successful blog has to be updated regularly, which is a lot easier to do if you write quickly.

2. I'm not really a political junkie, which makes it hard to write about politics all the time. I could write about a variety of topics rather than just focussing on politics, but I don't think that that approach works for readers, who want to know what to expect when they visit a blog.

3. The market for political blogs is pretty saturated. The time to start a major blog of political commentary was a few years ago. Now, even if I somehow manage to equal the brilliance and insightfulness of the best of the existing blogs, there is little reason for people to switch to reading me rather than the blogs they are currently reading.

Of course, rather than trying for brilliance, I could go for stupidity. Donald Luskin seems to be pretty dumb, but Brad DeLong links to him all the time. I think that approach only works for people who have jobs writing commentary. Luskin isn't entirely stupid, because he's figured out how to get paid for writing stupid things.