B.A.D. Moon Rising

Special thanks to Jon Swift, Skippy, and Blue Gal for making sure that, once a year, the act of making sure our auld blog acquaintances who till the rocky digital soil not be forgot is a deliberate and formal one.

Because whatever you hear -- whatever the experts tell you -- blogging is not primarily about aggregation, traffic strategies, platforms, widgets, tweets, hopfrog inverse pingoat capture tricks, RSS, ASS, blobbery versus raptorness, CPC, Captcha quizzes, cloudsliding, Google Adsense Disorder, blog derivative swap instruments, pageflakeishness, blam salting, podnovafication or shakin' your Chitka-maker.

(Although you should probably pay attention to about half of those things.)

(Since the other half are mostly stuff I made up.)

Blogging is about writing and community.

It is the oldest of wines in the newest of skins, so whether you want to sell soup or change the world, you'd better be able to do more than shout "Buy My SOOP!" or "Fuck You!" into a box canyon.

You'd better be able to build a clean, compelling narrative about the world as it is, as it should be, and how to get from here to there. You'd better be able to find or make a community that shares your vision. And you'd better be able to stock an armory with vision and vocabulary sufficiently clear and powerful that any fellow traveler can pick them up, point them in the right direction and not blow their toes off.

Blogging is about crafting the word and passing the word using a medium seemingly designed by God Almighty to insure maximum inclusion and democratization, which is why when a cartel of some of the Left's most prominent A-List bloggers who had built their name and modest fortunes pushing the highly we're-all-in-this-together message of "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" decided to purge their rolls of all us icky little low-traffic ankle-biters, the general reaction was "WTF!?"

It still is.

Because if blogging is about writing and community, then the very last thing a real blogger would ever do is "bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain".


Which is why, February 3rd, all the coolest bloggers of New Gauchestan "Look up and Link down" by identifying five smaller-than-thine sites worth your attention and sending some eyeballs their way.


Like these cats:

Progressive Eruptions

Melina who writes her heart out at RIP Coco.

All things nihilist.

Gin and Tacos

Mannikkomaki (for all those whose better names were taken.)


I also want to shout out a personal thank you to Mike Finnegan and John Amato at the Very Big Blog I hang out at from time to time. "Crooks and Liars" is a powerhouse; a genuine media empire (from Forbes) --

Professional musician John Amato founded his political blog Crooks and Liars in October 2003. It's now one of most widely read progressive political blogs on the Web, and Amato, sometimes referred to as "the Vlogfather," is credited with helping pioneer video blogging.

-- that bootstrapped itself into existence in realtime and before our eyes using an unbeatable blend of fine writing, music and hot, fresh, topical video, all while taking great care to never lose its inclusive, small-blogger-friendly touch.

Which takes some doing.