MVN - Most Valuable Network

Requiem for a Blog

If you haven’t seen (and if you haven’t seen you’re probably my mom, because who else would go to OMG first?) Chris Needham of Capitol Punishment has hung up his computer typing fingers.  Grisly, but sadly true.

All bloggers care about how many people are reading thier blog on some level.  Some care alot, some care a little, but they all care on some level or else they’d be writing in a locked journal they keep hidden under their My Little Pony bank, not on the internet. I think this was especially true among the Nats bloggers since the community really sprung up overnight when the Expos were rumored to be moving to DC.  (Trust me, I was writing about the Expos a few months before the rumors started.  The Expos blogging community was basically JP Allard and…nope that’s it.)  Everyone was in on the ground floor or close to it.

There was some jockeying between all these new blogs, everyone looking out to see if they had become THE blog.   Not that most cared if they didn’t reach that level, but who doesn’t want to be loved besides Oscar the Grouch?   We posted and found our niches.  Some people gave up posting and others came in. Eventually everything shaked out and it became clear that in the past year or so Capitol Punishment had become THE blog for Washington Nationals opinion/news/vitriol.  More readers, an active comment community, chances to write in other venues, it was the little blog that could.  Worse for us other blogs, Chris managed to do this by totally cheating and using both quantity and quality to climb to the top of this little heap. No gimmicks, graphics, or access.  Just good prolific writing.  How can you compete with that?

[Is it sad that the end of a blog interests me more than whatever the Nats did last night? I go back and forth on this.]

There’s no real take-home message here, other than it’s always disappointing to see something you enjoy end and Chris’ blog should have been enjoyable for any Nats fan. Go over an wish Chris that the wind will always be at his back, and that he should never forget the class of ’03 and stuff. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 9:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.