The death of small blogs?

  I think not.
  It appears the reliable Right Wing News Hawkins has gone Hollywood, claiming in a post entitled "The small painful coming death of the independent conservative blogosphere" about small blogs, like this one, with its faithful reader (ha).

Find a way to dramatically increase the size of your blog, expand into multiple websites that together are big, hook up with someone who’s already big, or accept that there isn’t much of a future in a small, niche market for you. Maybe that sounds a little grim, but unless something changes, independent conservative bloggers who haven’t already made it big don’t have a bright future.

  Hawkins details the birth and evolution of the blogosphere but misses a point that Instapundit catches:

Don’t look at The Big Players as all that matters as it just does not work that way any more… that is ‘Old Think’, i.e. newspaper era think. The heterarchical nature of the internet changes things fundamentally.

100,000 small blogs with 100 readers per day move ideas around in ways that are vastly harder to track but they are just as important as 100 blogs with 100,000 readers each. . . .

I no longer get my information from a newspaper whilst drinking my morning coffee… I spend about the same time quickly scanning a selection of blogs and then mine deeper based upon what I find, and many, indeed most of those blogs are not high readership… so what? It matters much less than you think 

  This is absurd, exclusionary and elitist. Hey, that's great if you're an Althouse or an Instapundit or a Right Wing News and you literally get millions of readers. Great for you. Successful. A voice that's heard, guh, nationally.
  But if you're like us, you keep plugging away because you finally have the temerity to say what you think in a public forum. You've sat back for years and listened to liberals, celebrities, elitists who think they have an insight into life that you, the nobody in flyoverville, don't have.
  You should be listening to the big dogs. Keep your mouth shut. Keep working, paying your taxes, and eat your peas.
  The passion that motivates little guys like us is the same passion that fueled a revolution, the same passion that prompted an army of farmers to take their pitchforks into the arena and shout, "Don't tread on me." Yeah, they were farmers, but they could shoot and they loved their country and their independence enough to take measures to preserve it.
  Does Hawkins not know that the latest revolution has spawned millions of patriots who have finally heard the call?
  Does Hawkins not know that, if we influence just one or two people, that makes a difference? That one by one we will win this country back?
  Are we offended by what Hawkins at RWN says?
  Not in the least.
  We'll just keep on our merry way, doing what we do.