This is Not A Blog Continued

Another little non-progress report. There are more changes in the blogosphere, that mythical land between Time Magazine and Twitter. I'm not sure, however, that I can completely separate my analysis from my own changing feelings and tastes. So I won't try.

The 2008 election campaign changed things a lot. For example, it brought in a whole new generation to Daily Kos, and changed that place pretty decisively. It's become younger, the diaries shorter and less substantive, and the recommended list reflects more than ever a combination of ideological bullying, social networking swapping and above all, trigger happy readers losing their minds over the topic of the hour. Perhaps as compensation, the front page (and presumably paid) posters are getting longer and more wonkish.

I'd describe Kos now as a political social networking site, and more than one regular there has referred to it as the Borg. I find myself spending very little time there on each visit. Part of that is also the predictability, and the emphasis on political opposition--on in fact highlighting every stupid ugly thing a Republican or right winger says or does. It's also why I watch less of Keith and Rachel, and less cable in general.

I became obsessed by every scrap of political news and addicted to a dozen or more political sites and blogs, as well as the cable political shows, during the campaign. But once Obama won, I got more interested in the governing--in the doing the stuff we fought to get done--than the daily mudwrestling of politics.

I realize that progressive blogs perform an important service (a matter of a little blogospheric controversy yesterday actually), and I've always maintained that a progressive President needs activists to the left, as well as just plain intelligence and moral clarity from other perspectives. And of course politics has to be played in order to get legislation passed and so on. But the landscape looks so basically ugly--and if I may quote myself (of course I may, who's gonna stop me): " our media-fueled self-renewing cyclones of distraction, our 24/7 locust plagues of pettiness, our twittering fits of trivial obsessions, our instant acting out, and the dead slogans nailed to our identities and shouting matches."

I felt a little justified in what I've been doing on this blog when President Obama unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize. You'd be hard pressed to find another site that contained in detail the evidence that the Nobel Prize committee used in deciding to give him the award. But here it all is. It's one of the few times that my concentration on the Big Picture, at least as I see it, seemed to find some justification in the news.

I still go to the Political Wire, to TPM and Think Progress for the political news of the day--they're quick and good. For some months I have indulged in a nightly dip into the Huffington Post, but I doubt I will anymore. The cross between National Inquirer and the Nation, plus Ariana's ego, has gotten old. She's trying to invent an online magazine form that will dominate the niche it creates, while she campaigns against other models. I'm not interested. It's a lot of flash and much too careless. More than anything I'm bored. I find myself clicking to a couple of sites for sports news afterwards much more quickly than I used to.

The Internet is full of wonderful things, but I like most of them as an adjunct to other things, like books and movies and life. For looking things up on Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database. I'm trying to get in the habit of scanning more specialized aggregators and sites, but my heart isn't entirely in it. I yearn for someplace to go to read somebody good. But that's not what the Internet does. And so I wind up writing some pale version of what I'd like to read. Which is another reason why this is not a blog.

I suppose I could brush up on the technological ways of increasing potential readership here and in my little blogosphere, by making it easier to "subscribe" (whatever that means), or to get this on your cell phone. Maybe I should. But it's unlikely.

I am not a blog. I am not the Borg.