January 31, 2009, Blogroll Amnesty
February is just loaded with great stuff... from the day we celebrate the births of our 1st and 16th Presidents, to Groundhog Day, to Blogroll Amnesty Day (February 3rd), the only holiday in blogtopia for blogtopia (yiksctt, skippy, etc.).
We in blog-world, even those of us who have been "blogging" since one week after 11 Sept. 2001 before the term "blog" or "web log" was even in wide parlance, all too often fall into the solipsism of thinking that what we do is terribly much more than a self-indulgent hobby. This is such an occasion. Prior to the first "blogroll amnesty," which was in fact, an act of self-absolution by the proprietor of progressive blogging behemoth eschaton to excuse himself for purging all but the most well-trafficked 50 or so progressive blogs (and 1 or 2 other token "lesser blogs" so that Duncan could try to deny, without credibility as far as I was and am concerned, that he was simply reverting to a "big-traffic" blog-roll), those of us who did not have tens of thousands of daily hits and advertising revenue and big media talk-show appearances could still feel part of a broader "community."
It was an illusion to be sure, but what did it cost Eschaton, or the Daily Kos (the latter never blogrolled this humble blog... but it did on occasion blogroll some "lesser" blogs) to pretend to reach out to disparate low-trafficked voices? Nothing... that's what. But "amnesty" was declared anyway, and.. well, here we are. It's a free country and no one is obliged to blogroll anyone else, of course, but we can at least hearken back to the days before 2-3-07 when any blog, no matter how humble, might get a permalink from a mega-blog.
And so, in this era of "Yes we can," when even a graduate of my own humble Ivy League college class can rise to the Presidency of the United States, the can-do spirit that imbued the blogosphere I knew is still alive, as we salute the heroic efforts of Jon Swift, skippy, and Blue Gal to keep this holiday alive, so that a true bottom-up, true-to-its-spirit-of-not-being-part-of-the-same-big-money-media-corporate-entertainment-military-industrial-complex spirit lives on, and we will never forget.
And thus ends today's outburst of solipsism. Hey, how 'bout that Blago?