The Costs of Blogging
Writing a blog, on the face of things, is not very difficult.  You fire up your web browser, log in, click "Write a new post", type an engaging and ground-breaking missive, click submit, and voila!  Reader appreciation in spades.

In fact, as any blogger who aspires even to a modest-sized readership knows, life is considerably more complicated.  To begin with, there are the technical choices (and associated costs) of which blogging platform to choose, and where and how to install it.  Then there are the strategic choices of audience targeting, and where and how to promote your blog (and the costs of promotion).  Furthermore, there are ongoing editorial choices - what to write about, how often, how to cover the topic, and on and on.

Added to these costs are hidden costs, which grow or shrink depending on the blogger's personal circumstances and chosen topic area.  If you don't already own a computer and have Internet access, you need to make some fairly heavy equipment purchases, and pay high Internet subscription costs.  If you tend to write about obscure topics, you may need access to Lexis/Nexis or a similar information service.  If you play a media watchdog role, you're probably buying a fair number of newspaper or magazine subscriptions, and maybe purchasing a bunch of books.  If you liveblog important political events, you're probably paying a cable subscription, travel costs, and/or conference registrations.  If you are blogging full-time, or your blogging precludes you from taking a job with benefits, then you're paying your own health insurance, and not receiving benefits like contributions to a pension or 401(k) fund.

Finally, there is the most important variable: time.  There's time you donate to your own blog and (if you're managing a group blog) the time of your associates, which may or may not be donated.  Writing time is the highest cost of writing a blog, and it frequently goes unreimbursed.

Blogger and Blogosphere Support
The easiest way to provide services for bloggers is to help bloggers pay for some or all of these costs, through direct reimbursement, bulk-purchase discounts, or some other avenue.

To give you an idea of how this would work, a very simple blogger support organization could work as follows: bloggers sign up for membership in the organization, and pay a small yearly membership fee.  The organization, in turn, purchases a lot of magazine subscriptions, and lets members choose to receive a fixed number of subscriptions.  The organization's main role is to be a bulk purchaser, which reduces per-subscription costs for bloggers.  A similar model could be used to purchase health insurance, Internet hosting provider services, and so on.  The model could be tweaked in various other ways: for example, with sufficient support from big donors, benefits could be provided to bloggers for free, if bloggers meet some criteria.

Another mechanism for supporting bloggers is to give them free or reduced-cost professional services, such as web development, graphic design, accounting, legal services, etc.  In additional to the usual payment models for professional services (dues from bloggers, donations from big donors), professional services could be provided on a volunteer basis.  For example, blog readers could volunteer to provide their professional talents to blog writers on an ad hoc basis.  Alternatively, bloggers could trade services with one another, using a barter model.  The cottage industry of open source blogging software, content management software, and blogging templates is another good example of an avenue in which professional services (web development or web design) are provided to bloggers on a volunteer basis.

Alongside goods and services, bloggers sometimes need advice or mentorship, and this need presents another possible kind of support.  A blogger support organization could provide bloggers assistance in making technical, strategic, or editorial choices.  A "blogger school", blogger resource guide, or a similar kind of service could help bloggers make technical decisions about their blogs; or it could help them focus on a topic or learn more about that topic, in order to write better posts; or it could help them maximize the revenue from their blogs.  

Leaving aside goods and services with monetary value, bloggers frequently need access to political events or personalities.  Most frequently, this is expressed in blogger circles as the need for press passes to some event or another; and fortunately, there is a slow but steady trend towards extending press passes to bloggers at conventions and other Democratic political events.  But access goes deeper than that too - it includes opportunities to interview candidates and officials, solicitations of feedback on strategic plans, etc.  It would be nice to think that left-leaning politicians and organizations will eventually come around to granting this kind of access to bloggers.  Realistically, though, bloggers will probably need an organization which can advocate for them, and steadily work on finding a seat at the table for bloggers.  In a way, this is what BlogPAC is doing, in certain targeted ways (especially with regards to net neutrality.)  YearlyKos, by soliciting visits from Democratic luminaries, is also working to give bloggers a seat at the table.  Access is a nebulous concept, and there's plenty of room for many different organizations to help bloggers gain it.

There is a final category of supporting organizations which would be better described as blogosphere support, rather than blogger support: organizations which work to strengthen the blogosphere as a whole, rather than individual bloggers.  Such organizations identify gaps in the progressive blogosphere, and work to fill them.  That includes locating individuals who have something to say and encouraging them to blog; finding issues, geographic areas, media institutions, or other niches which aren't well covered by the blogosphere, and recruiting someone to do so; identifying other blogospheres with which the progressive blogosphere should interact, and building bridges between the spheres; and so on.  There's tons of work which needs to be done along these lines; unfortunately, it is probably the most difficult work in this area, and the work which is least likely to be self-sustaining.

Coming up next...
This post has mostly focused on the kinds of things which need to be done to support bloggers and the blogosphere.  For the most part, I've intentionally avoided mentioning, from a mechanical/organizational point of view, how this would be done.  That discussion will have to wait for the third post in this series.  However, rest assured that there's plenty of work to go around; I imagine that there's room for a few dozen blogger/blogosphere support organizations, with a variety of organizational structures, revenue models, and benefit profiles.

In the next post, I'll discuss the different kinds of revenue available to bloggers, and the kinds of services bloggers can offer to make money.  This is very relevant to blogger support, because one way organizations can support bloggers is to help them find customers, and/or make earning revenue easier.

In the meantime, please chime in below and suggest other ways in which blogger/blogosphere support organizations could provide goods and services which would support bloggers.  If you are a blogger yourself, perhaps you can answer this question: what are your most pressing needs, and how could a support organization help you meet them?