Splinters

Having read Steve's previous post, I can only concur with the Literary Saloon's assessment of James Callan's Telegraph article on litblogs: "As happens a lot with these sorts of articles, one suspects the writer is not an aficionado, but rather trying to gather a lot of material about a subject he doesn't know that much about; Callan does an admirable job of that, but that's all this is".

It's obviously a pity not to see Splinters and RSB in there, or 3AM for that matter, given that the Telegraph is a UK newspaper. (And one for which I used to freelance regularly too). Clearly our collective visibility is zero. We need to begin some sort of sinister cabal to get the attention we deserve. Deposit dead sheep outside book launches, that sort of thing. (Perhaps a collective site with our RSS feeds on it might do the trick - britlitblogs.com is still available).

I was going to send a polite comment to the Torygraph to point out the absence of British litblogs from the piece, but for any editorial comments their website suggests that you send them a letter. FFS.

Having said all that, Steve's right when he quotes me as saying that mentions of Spike in printed media, however big the circulation, rarely do much for our circulation. It's only links from the big online publications that give Spike traffic spikes. The Guardian's newsblog apparently linked to Spike a few weeks (I couldn't find it on their site) and traffic went mental for a day or so. But while print fed the Web in the early days, and the Web fed the circulations of magazines and newspapers who catered for the ever-growing audience trying to find out about the Net, now the two seem increasingly disconnected. The Net has come into its own, wholly ubiquitous and all-encompassing for the user. You don't need to refer outside of the Web for most information anymore: you can find it online. I say this not to jump on the tedious "death of print" bandwagon which seems to have rolled back into town recently, but to point out that print is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the Net as a source of new visitors.

It's always nice to see your name in the paper. But it doesn't bring many people to your door.

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