Coiney Acolyte Blog Changes Focus

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Two years ago, Minneapolis coin collector Jorg Lueke started a blog called "Ancient Coin Trade" which was very pro-ACCG in its views and promoted the no-questions-asked coin trade. There were 17 posts from February to May 2009, and then a hiatus until last month when a rather odd post called "the death of UNESCO" (prompted by the US withdrawal of funds from UNESCO) suddenly appeared. Yesterday the author changed the name of the blog to "A Historical Perspective" with the tagline: "A blog exploring history and how it is crafted, manipulated, and used by governments, agencies, and others".
The first post is about "The Financial Crisis"...

He has also started up a blog on "Home Bread Baking" which looks far more interesting.

John Hooker talks of the phenomenon of the "retreat into the more recent "blogosphere"...". He says that once they see they are reaching an audience, bloggers:

often go further off the rails. They start copying the dubious PR techniques of other bloggers, and often get an extreme following of mostly young and impressionable people who do not recognize these techniques. In turn, some of the followers than sometimes start their own blogs, proliferating the memes even more. These mostly follow the phenomenon of the new discussion lists, having few followers of their own and sometimes dying out when someone successfully refutes their thesis, or some details.

Mr Lueke's "Ancient Coin Trade" generated few followers, and followed the line of the ACCG bloggers quite closely and thus presented a number of incomplete theses which due to the manner of their presentation were easy to question or refute (I discussed a number here). Hopefully now he is presenting some of his own thoughts on "history", rather than simply following along with what the coiney dealers and their lobbyists say, we will see this renewed blog take off.

I am not sure I would agree with calling the blogosphere a "retreat". It certainly gets views out in the open and made available for discussion that would tend to be sidelined if restricted to specialist forums (eg numismatic forums, where they don't like discussions about some of the things discussed on some of the cultural heritage blogs anyway).