Walk #134: Napa Valley Thrift; Nature Blogging as a Money Maker?

I'm back in the Napa Valley.

I met a work colleague after work for a visit to the most excellent Thrift Shop run by the Catholic Church in St. Helena. Being this is a Trustfunder town, where donations like this brings large tax deductions, the merchandise at the thrift shop is exceptional. Even for men's clothes. Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Eddie Bauer, Patagonia---all shirts sold at three bucks a pop. The least expensive way to dress for Napa Valley.

But what does this have to do with walking? I parked aways away from the store and walked there. And after my friend and I were done shopping (with a stop into my favorite watering hole for a couple of beers), I continued the sojourn in St. Helena. A hot day today. But a nice walk.

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A comment to Woodswalker made me curious about the Nature Blog Network, which this blog belongs to. My hunch is that Nature Blogs, for the most part, are self indulgent exercises (mine included) that mostly have no political relevancy. So I decided to test my hypothesis by visiting, at random, some of the blogs listed on the Nature Blog Network bug (to the right).

I visited most of the Number One blogs in all of the various categories. I then chose, at random, three or four blogs that looked like they might promote some sort of nature advocacy, from a few of the listed categories i. e. Birds, Hiking, Ecosystem, and so on.

What did I find out?

I visited twenty two Nature Blogs.

Four of them advertised a Nature Advocacy Group...but one of them was to raise money for its own site. Which doesn't seem to count. So only three of the twenty two blogs had any sort of collective advocacy on their sites.

Only one site had an advertisement for a major advocacy group (The Nature Conservancy).

Interestingly, twelve of the twenty two blogs had advertisements from Google on them, in effect, making their own blog an attempt at money making for themselves. So, in other words, in this unscientific survey of nature blogs, people are more apt to attempt to make money for themselves on what they write, than promote a beloved cause to their audiences.

Simply said, four times as many bloggers attempt to make money for themselves rather than promote an environmental advocacy group.

I think that is telling, don't you?