That day whereon we little folk rise early, get down on our wee, dimpled knees and celebrate the glorious anniversary of that glorious moment when certain glorious A-List bloggers finally got shut of the smelly, little monkeys amongst whom they had been ingloriously trapped,
grabbed a glorious horse...
rode off with the glorious girl...
to a glorious future free from...
Oopsie
OK then, well, let's just never mind that shall we?
Instead, how about going around and giving these folks a little pat on the ass?
Or admire the patience of a "Ramshackle Beauty" who has been banging away on the side of the angels six years?
Or give their optic nerves a workout on the gray-on-black font scheme jungle-gym, the "Leftwing Nut Job" has waiting for you?
Or be led on a personal hazmat-slog through some of the less fragrant and scenic territories on the Right by "The Free Republik", after which "From Laurel Street" will have a little tonic for your soul waiting on tap?
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.
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.
That day whereon we little folk rise early, get down on our wee, dimpled knees and celebrate the glorious anniversary of that glorious moment when certain glorious A-List bloggers finally got shut of the smelly, little monkeys amongst whom they had been ingloriously trapped,
grabbed a glorious horse...
rode off with the glorious girl...
to a glorious future free from...
Oopsie
OK then, well, let's just never mind that shall we?
Support the day at Jon Swift's house (despicable conservative though he is) and enjoy the vituperation (which I do believe is the proper term of venery in this instance) of petite powerhouses he is gathering up.
Join the Shrill Krill Kult and enjoy the day with a little e.e. cummings:
all ignorance toboggans into know
all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again: but winter's not forever,even snow melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?
all history's a winter sport or three: but were it five,i'd still insist that all history is too small for even me; for me and you,exceedingly too small.
Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave merely to toil the scale to shrillerness per every madge and mabel dick and dave --tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do, we'll move away still further:into now
