Successful blogging is hard, dirty work: it's the hand-to-hand combat of the writing world. In this month's Wired there's an excellent piece written by Fred Vogelstein in which he profiles Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a very successful Silicon Valley blog about new companies.

If you've got a friend who thinks they can make money with their blog, get them to read this piece. Like all people who rise to the top of their profession, it demonstrates a simple truth: good bloggers work like dogs. You can't expect readers to show up unless you show up. And the internet never closes. So Arrington is at his desk in his house about ten minutes after he wakes up. Then he writes all day. Then he goes out to Silicon Valley parties to schmooze. Then he comes home and does it all again the following day. He reckons he has worked every day for the last two years on his blog. Every successful blogger I've come across is the same. Eat, sleep and drink the work. No time out, no holidays – in Arrington's case, 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

I can believe it. It takes amazing focus and energy not only to drink from the fire hose of content that is the World Wide Web and make sense of it, but also to direct your own little water pistol back at it and actually get noticed. You need a big ego, a loud voice, and a thick skin. And you need to burn with a restless intensity that makes people want to come back and see what you've got to say. In Arrington's market, you also need powerful people to take you seriously, and you need to get your facts straight, and you need the odd scoop so that old media has to grudgingly acknowledge that you're in the game – US reporters take the copper-bottomed scoop very seriously indeed. None of this is easy.

Arrington is trying to expand his blog by adding a bunch of other blogs that will turn him into a media empire. This strikes me as a huge challenge. Blogging is a performance art, like juggling. Some people can do it very well, but have you ever tried to manage a troop of jugglers? If the bloggers Arrington attracts are as good as him, they can quite easily set up on their own and tell him to go swivel. If they're not as good, we'll just keep reading Arrington. It's very hard to take a maverick talent and turn it into an institution. And when Arrington is in meetings to discuss the page layouts for additional blogs and settling the awkward personality conflict between two people in his team, he won't be writing great stuff or networking with people to inform that writing. One man can't do everything.

Of course, some smart entrepreneurs figure out how to surround themselves with the people to complement their skills, and there are several very successful blog networks out there. Maybe Arrington will have the management savvy to pull it off, but either way I love the image of this six-foot-four man with a persona somewhere between "an aging linebacker and Tony Soprano" as the new face of new media. He is not blogging about his cats. And if he wants that parking space I should let him have it. If you're a journalist reading this and thinking, ah, time for a nice lunch and then perhaps this is the day to knock off early, take a moment to think of the bloggers out there who want to eat that lunch. (For what it's worth, Arrington has his eyes firmly set on CNET's lunch, according to the piece.) Perhaps I'll bring in a sandwich on Monday.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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