Goodbye, Tim
I’m sorry to see that Tim Dunlop is going on hiatus. His Road to Surfdom quickly became popular, partly due to Tim’s judicious curation of links and consistently excellent writing, but mainly because he understands blogging as a medium.
Tim worked hard to build a community by insisting on civility in his comments threads, by encouraging regular commenters to set up their own sites, and by spreading his links beyond a small clique. He sought out and highlighted lesser-known blogs in order to draw them into the conversation.
I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that Surfdom was the most significant Howard-era blog. When a blogger of that calibre bows out, and offers his thoughts on the future of public affairs blogging, it’s worth reading. It’s hard to argue with Tim’s conclusion:
Spare me the heartfelt cries of how much you love this blog or that blog and just accept the fact that if you really want a functioning independent media you are going to have to pay for it. It’s that friggin simple.
In the US that’s certainly been possible — whether by a sponsorship model or by the injection of massive startup capital — but even the best blogs can struggle. I’m not sure whether either of these approaches can work in Australia.
A far more likely model is for public affairs blogging to become an adjunct to other things. This is already occurring, informally. Australia’s leading political blogs are run by university academics, think tank employees, and journalists — but by and large these are overgrown hobby blogs.
The next step is for such blogs to be given explicit institutional support. The groups that should fund blogging are think tanks, little magazines, trade unions, community organisations. If they ignore the so-called “pro-blogger” and “search-engine optimisation” parasites, and let the bloggers be bloggers, this approach could have a real future in Australia.
Hopefully, in time, one of these groups will bring Tim Dunlop back to the blogosphere.
Elsewhere: Larvatus Prodeo, Crikey, An Onymous Lefty, John Quiggin.