the blogger's curse

I was reading George Monbiot's website today, and the following comment struck me as being a bit relevant to people who blog:

Part of the problem for those of us who make our living by expressing our opinions is that after a while consistency becomes boring, both to the reader and to the writer. Soon you start wanting to shock people, to shake things up, to draw attention to yourself. This is the columnist's fate: either you become irrelevant, one of those dusty old bores, utterly predictable and stale, you'll find in all the newspapers and magazines, or you become incoherent - swinging from one extreme to another, picking on any target, however soft, in an attempt to renew the value of your stock.

Another hazard is success. Your ideas begin to echo in the corridors of power, and two things then happen to you. The first is that you don't want to lose your new-found influence by alienating the powerful people who have begun to listen to you. The second is that you begin to identify with them. The people on whose behalf you claim to speak - the common man and woman - become invisible to you.

And this, of course, is not to mention the opportunities apostasy offers. When you say the magic words - I support those who possess power - the world opens up for you. When you say the opposite, it closes down.

Food for thought I thought...