Making the Atlantic 300
A quick look at Technorati or Alexa, will show that Rainy Day is not one of the 300 most-visited blogs or sites on the web. All one needs to do is read Clay Shirky's "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" to understand why. Sob. Life's not fair. Sob.
But then, Rainy Day has never courted mass popularity. The benchmark here is, er, quality. A facile excuse, no doubt, but what do you expect us to say? Still, despite not quite making the A list, we'll be more than satisfied if we make David Bradley's list. The founder of The Corporate Executive Board is worth some $300 million and he's now spending a considerable amount of that money in turning a 150-year-old, money-losing magazine, The Atlantic, into a profitable, must-visit website. For that purpose, he's devoting a lot of time to reading blogs.
Along with Atlantic editor James Bennet, Bradley is combing the blogosphere to recruit the "Atlantic Society". This, he says, will be "300 of the smartest human beings across the main intellectual terrains we're likely to cover." Once found, the plan is to ask them, "would they be essayists for the Atlantic?" According to the Washington Post, Bradley and Bennet "are researching which bloggers to hire and what journalistic personalities would fit the bill for Atlantic online." Interestingly, there will be "generous coverage of wine, food and travel." Let's have those Rainy Day categories once again, please: wine, food and travel. In may well turn out that our selecting of The Atlantic as the "Magazine of The Year" last year, was, you know, fortuitous.
