alternative hippopotamus

Avedon observes here that we may be experiencing a cool front as of late:

Like many of the 2nd and 3rd-tier bloggers [ed: I’ll flatter myself and say that I’m an 8th tier blogger], I’ve noticed a tailing-off of hits over the last several months. Kos and Atrios can’t be the only people who purged their blogrolls, since I would have been unaffected by those (because Kos never had me on his, and Atrios kept me on) - but I’m definitely seeing fewer incoming referrals lately, partly because some old friends have gone dark, but also because some people have similarly purged me, if no one else, from their blogrolls.

It’s not just the blogrolls, though. I’ve noticed even in myself a greater tendency to look first at some of the bigger blogs and to spend less time going through the smaller ones. There’s a feedback effect there as their authors are likely to do the same thing, with the result that everyone is linking something from Eschaton, and I don’t feel much inspiration to link to something on a small blog that just quotes Atrios and doesn’t add much original content. But, like me, many people have had a decreasing interest in doing much original writing, and I guess many of us feel that either it’s already been said numerous times over the years or else Digby just said it in the latest post.

First, regarding readership and the decline thereof. Some trends are cyclical. Over time, people are more and then less interested in reading blogs, or other ways of keeping up with the latest current events. And, of course the 2006 elections did change the tone and the nature of the political dialog in this country. I continue to enjoy my favorite blogs, though certainly I don’t feel that the need is as great as the period between 2002 and 2006, a period I’ll always think of as the Dark Years. Thankfully survival has given place to a period of oversight, which, while great for healing the damage, may mean there’s less urgency for the stuff you can get from the blogs.

To put it an entirely different way: I had made a promise to myself that after the 2004 election was over, and Kerry became the 44th POTUS, I would take a break from the slings and arrows of outrageous political fortune. As it turned out, that break was not to be.

Even worse, the Republican-controlled House, Senate, and White House saw this as an opportunity to inflict some serious damage. Do you remember that chorus of youngsters in Brooks Brothers’ suits chanting: “Hey hey. Ho ho. Social Security has got to go?” Meanwhile, Bush was touring the country explaining how we’d all get rich from Private Accounts, ejecting anyone who voiced dissent, or even might voice dissent. Do you know how close we came to drilling the rest of the coast of Alaska? Or how about cutting terrorism funding for NYC and DC, giving the money instead to Republican-friendly states? Then there’s the extra-ordinary rendition, the end of habeous corpus, and the Gonzo-approved torture policies. On the lighter side there was the attempted Republican coup against Public Broadcasting.

Now I understand the old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. As Thorton Wilder put it, we got through it by the skin of our teeth. It’s not a surprise that some of us need a breather.

The Republican Noise Machine hasn’t gone away, of course. Still, while it’s true that they’re gearing up to fight the fight against global warming, right now they’re fuming over Al Gore’s Oscar, and staging pseudo debates on NPR. When the fight over Global Warming gets serious, as it will in the not-too-distant-future, I trust that some of us will return to the fray.

Since Avedon mentioned blog rolls specifically, I wanted to comment on how my reading habits have changed. These days I read pretty much everything through an rss reader. Usually using bloglines on my mobile phone at a favorite pub or cafe. Even newspapers I mostly read on the mobile using pressdisplay’s interface. I can’t exactly call it one of life’s simple joys, but it’s a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon, curled up in front of the imaginary fire at Elephant&Castle with their very real wifi. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and TCP/IP.

I’d suggest that blogrolls, while being a way to acknowledge the work of your favorite bloggers, may not be the most useful way. Instead, I’d like to suggest something I started to experiment with a couple of months ago: create your own rss feed of articles and blogposts that you find interesting, and post it on your blog. Originally I did this by hand, but that was too much of a chore. Social bookmark sites like del.icio.us automate the process, and well, you can see the result in the righthand column of this page.