I suppose I should say something about these new FTC blogger endorsement guidelines. The only products I ever get sent for free are books, and it’s actually a bit of a mess to keep track of which books were sent to me by whom and for what purpose. At the same time, it’s a bit hard for me to understand what the upside would be in saying positive things about books I didn’t actually like in order to receive free copies of books. Insofar as I want free copies of books, I want free copies of good books, so why not just praise the good ones? In reality, receiving large quantities of free books is a bit of a problem since most of the books aren’t very interesting and they’re inconvenient to store and surprisingly difficult to give away.

The other thing I’ve gotten over the years has been free trips to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, and Denmark so it’s probably a safe bet to assume that I’m secretly an agent of possibly nefarious Northern European intelligence services.

Here’s Tom Friedman:

That is why I was heartened to see the liberal Center for American Progress stating last week that, while the stimulus is vital to rescuing our economy, the size of projected budget deficits demand that we also start thinking about broad-based tax increases and reductions in some spending and entitlement programs supported by liberals.

And here’s Marc Ambinder:

Among the D[emocracy] A[alliance]’s success stories: it has contributed to CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has used its money to harass Democrats and Republicans with ethics issues and whose investigation of contractors in Afghanistan have led to a review of State Department policies. Media Matters, a liberal press watchdog group, is bigger today than it was before the election. DA also helped fund the Center for American Progress, the uber-progressive think and action tank. Membership costs $55,000 for the first year and at least $30,000 per year after that.

And Michelle Malkin:

CAP is a lead organization in the Health Care for America Now coalition, the so-called “grassroots” lobbying group for Obama’s health care takeover legislation run out of 1825 K Street in Washington, D.C., with a $40 million budget. CAP is also the parent group of Think Progress, the far-left website leading the smear campaign against fiscally conservative activists who protested at congressional town halls this summer. And several CAP alumni are now leading the Obamacare push at the Department of Health and Human Services, including special HHS assistant Michael Halle and HHS Director Jeanne Lambrew, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who worked on health policy in the Clinton administration.

Apparently Halle was a CAP intern in 2007. So you can see everyone should apply to the program, since it’s apparently a one-way ticket to running the country.

Now the thing looks like a busted etch-a-sketch. Is there some way to fix this?

You can put long articles on the internet. But Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor of Time.com says it doesn’t really work and he has a sensible explanation of why. If you look at the traffic statistics for any newsish website you’ll see that people are reading when they’re supposed to be at work. Which means they’re multitasking. Which means they want short items.

This reminds me that something I’ve come to understand in my years in the business is that probably the greatest privilege that writers for traditional magazines have is that nobody has any idea who’s reading them. Instead, they get to sort of operate with this mental image of things working very differently from the guy reading blogs instead of filling out his TPS Report. Maybe you’re relaxing in your easy chair, smoking a pipe, lovingly devouring each and every sentence of that 6,000 feature. Nice to think of your writing getting that kind of loving care from readers.

But if you think about how magazines actually work, it’s really not like that. I subscribe to The New Yorker because it’s a great magazine. But do I read every article that’s in every issue of the New Yorker? Of course not. In fact, some weeks I barely read any articles at all. And as best I can tell, the same is true of most New Yorker subscribers. And certainly almost nobody reads more than a trivial percentage of the content The New York Times puts out on any given day. But in print, nobody can really tell what’s being read or when or why or by whom. You just know that the gestalt is selling. Which gives editors and writers a lot of flexibility in terms of what they put into the gestalt. Which is fun because in my experience people get into writing and editing periodicals primarily because they enjoy doing it rather than because they’re genuinely interested in being responsible fiduciary agents of profit-maximizing shareholders.

On the web, there’s much less wiggle room and much less room for self-deception. You need readers who really and truly do click over to your site each and every day, not “subscribers” who may or may not be reading any given issue. And you know the—unflattering—truth about when they read you. Generally at work, and with intermittent attention.

Tina Dupuy conveys an interesting point from Jay Rosen:

We asked Rosen what he thought of the term “blogger” and how there is not a word to distinguish a journalist who blogs and a numbnut who blogs.

“Blogger will become such a broad term it will lose all meaning,” he told FBLA.

So in five years will “blogger” be synonymous with “writer?” Will telling someone you’re a blogger need the same follow up question as there is for when you tell someone you’re a writer?

That seems about right. One thing you see even within the smaller universe of the “netroots” is that at each annual Yearly Kos / Netroots Nation convention there’s larger and larger amounts of divergence between what people are doing. Some of the folks who are newer to the game don’t totally appreciate this dynamic, but I recall how back in 2002-2003 there was a pretty undifferentiated mush of “liberal bloggers” that’s become a much more elaborated ecology of people and institutions doing pretty different things.

Alyssa Rosenberg on being a writer:

My experience has been, as Daniel Strauss says, that people become artists, or in the case of journalists, artisans (I wish that term hadn’t fallen into disuse. It lends a level of precision to the space between the novel and the corporate report.) because they can’t stop doing whatever it is they love: write, paint, sing, compose, act, etc. And I think that inability to stop comes from a match between talent and desire. I write much better than I draw, paint or collage, despite the classes I’ve taken in the latter disciplines, and I keep writing because it’s the way I’m best capable of expressing the ideas and capturing some of the beauty I was, um, less than capable of capturing through art.

When I first read that, I thought “yeah, that’s right.” Then I thought the better of it. Certainly I know some people who are basically professional writers but who actually hate writing. What they love is the reporting—calling people, finding stuff out, getting the story. When it comes time to actually put pixel to monitor, they find themselves full of anxiety. But maybe that’s just another way of saying the same thing; that a compulsive need to do the thing is still the driving force, but it’s just not a compulsive need to write.

But certainly for the high-volume blogger, I just don’t see how you could succeed unless you had a maniacal urge to write. And that’s something I’ve always had. Before I owned an air card, half of my train or bus trips to and from New York would inevitably result in me starting a novel of some sort. Not because I want to write a novel, but just because it seemed inconceivable to sit for that long with a laptop in my bad without writing something. Before there were blogs, I was always writing in a journal and apparently my grandfather did the same thing for decades. Consequently, I find it to be a great privilege to have a job where I can just write all the time, about all kinds of stuff, more-or-less at random. For me writing-as-such has always been a necessary activity, and trying to find constructive venues in which to do it a bit problematic. The blog solves the problem.

For some larger thoughts on the ethics of the issue, I’d recommend what Julian Sanchez has to say. But a separate point I would make is that the whole notion that you might want to “unmask” a pseudonymous internet persona with a longstanding and stable presence on the web strikes me as partaking of certain slightly odd presuppositions. The thinking seems to be that some almost magical power is held by knowing the real name of a blogger. This seems to me to be about on a par with the stories (are they even true?) you sometimes hear about tribes who think that you can steal someone’s soul by taking a photograph, or that if you learn the true names of animals you can command them to do your bidding.

I mean, it’s not as if the fact that my name is “Matthew Yglesias” is a particularly interesting or important fact about me (indeed, it’s not even on my birth certificate, though it is my real legal name since I was a few days old). Arguably, various biographical facts about me are relevant. I’ve written that I’m from New York City, that I went to Dalton and Harvard, that my dad’s a writer, etc. But I could be lying about that stuff consistent with using my accurate name. And plenty of people who do blog under their real names are not as forthcoming with biographical information. But the point is that if the idea is that someone is actively misrepresenting themselves on the Internet—blogging about climate change without ever mentioning that you work in the PR department for a coal company—that’s clearly a problem. But the problem is the misrepresentation rather than the pseudonym. And, indeed, this trick can be pulled off just as easily with full name and biographical details. After all, you know all about me, but you have no idea who CAPAF’s donors are, and the same applies to just about everyone you read who works at a DC-based non-profit.

And of course it’s a fallacy to assume a perfect identity between any Internet persona and its author(s). A whole bunch of different writers collaborate on producing Think Progress and they write in what I think is a pretty uniform voice. But like the writers behind The Economist, they’re actually all beautiful unique snowflakes who are often quite different from the TP persona. And by the same token, Matthew Yglesias “in real life” is not the same as the character I play on the Internet. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s quite right to say that the in-the-flesh MY is “real” and the on-the-Internet one is somehow “fake.” This blog has existed for over seven years now, and it’s almost certainly the case that more people “know” the persona than know me. And I think that should hold all the more strongly for any prominent pseudonymous bloggers. The well-known, stable character is a person with integrity, influence, a personality, a reputation, social connections, etc., the same as anyone else. To be sure, they may be artifice in terms of the presentation of the character. But our various “in real life” self-presentations (to a boss, to a first date, to family, to friends, to people we run into at a high school reunion) involve artifice as well.

My father has a new book, titled A Happy Marriage, his first novel in over a decade coming out in about a month. It made The Wall Street Journal’s list of recommended summer reading and there’s an excerpt available on the WSJ website.

Check out the excerpt and pre-order your copy here.

I don’t think being 27 quite worked out as well for me as being 26 had. Writing a book and seeing it published is a big thrill. Watching the meager, meager sales figures come in isn’t quite as thrilling. Still, over the past twelve months I got a new job that I love, took advantage of the collapse of the housing market to buy a condo that I love, scored free trips to Switzerland and Finland, and watched a staggering quantity of House re-runs. There was also a pretty interesting campaign.

At any rate, at this point I’ve been blogging for nearly a third of my life and probably something like 115% of my adult life. I make a living blogging, I met a health proportion of my friends through blogging, and most of all I really like blogging and think it’s pretty awesome that I get paid to do it. And none of that would be possible without you, the readers. It’s the fact that people are reading, and linking, and writing comments, and sending emails that makes it so fulfilling. So—thanks!

Good excuse for a “Cannonball” video, though.

100 Days of Change? Evaluating Obama’s First 100 Days:

Thursday, April 30, 2009 6:30 P.M. – 7:30 P.M. Center for American Progress, 1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor, Washington, DC 20009. Join us as we examine the first 100 days of the new administration. The panel will feature Matthew Yglesias, Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Amanda Carpenter, Reporter and Blogger for The Washington Times, Biko Baker, Executive Director of the League of Young Voters, and Khalil Thompson, Southern Regional Deputy Political Director for the Obama Campaign. Refreshments will be served. Click here to RSVP for the Panel Discussion.

My in-person insights are twice as good as the ones I blog.

Apparently Daniel Pinkwater’s written a book called The Yggyssey which I strongly feel should be a book about me. Or, at a minimum, about some other member of the Yglesias clan. The subtitle, however, is “How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There” and I never did anything remotely like that.

This sequel to The Neddiad (2007) is set in the same wacky landscape of 1950s Los Angeles. Iggy Birnbaum, who lives in a haunted hotel, discovers that the hotel’s ghosts are disappearing. After following a ghostly rabbit down a hole, Iggy and her friends encounter one strange Alice in Wonderland–type adventure after another and are nearly destroyed by witches until rescue comes from The Good Witch of the Northeast, who is “so good, she’s boring.” Once again, Pinkwater combines a goofy plot, myth and fairy tale references, and an obvious affection for yesteryear Los Angeles in a supernaturally funny read.

Too bad.

(do note, though, that the tweet about “Shadow Government” was from last night and I stand behind it)

The other day I was musing about the possibility of a 95 percent tax on earnings over $10 million, which prompted this piece of correspondence from reader J:

Ummm, a 95% tax is wrong because, ummm, it’s not the gov’ts money. The problem is that you, and probably most liberals, are not viewing this through the lens of what is moral. What right do you have to tell people they can’t make a certain amount of money? How about I put a cap on the number of hits your blog can get on a monthly basis? More hits might endanger the server. How about I put a cap on the amount of words you can type? Too many words may cause eye cramping for the poor reader. Here is the real question: why do liberals have a problem with freedom?

Personally, I would love a legal cap on the number of words a blogger is allowed to produce per day. I’m privileged to have a job that I really enjoy. But at the same time, I would prefer to write somewhat less—this pace is stressful and doesn’t leave me as much time to pursue other projects and interests. But though I would prefer to write somewhat less, I have a stronger second-order preference to produce a blog that’s competitive with other major offerings on the internet. And over the years competition between bloggers has led to escalating word-counts. The resulting situation isn’t terrible, there are lots of people you should cry for before you get to me, but basically we bloggers are engaged in a red queen’s race where we all need to keep trying harder and harder just to maintain our positions. A cap would be helpful.