This month, with an extra helping of metablogging!
Time to subdivide. The blogroll is now broken into ‘friends’ and ‘strangers,’ depending on whether I know those in question mainly as people or as bloggers. This is _not_ to say that the ‘friends’ are not fine bloggers in their own right, or that all ‘strangers’ are unknown to me personally. The Top Five will remain and will draw from both groups.
On to the changes:
* Hearty congratulations to Kevin Drum for scoring a paid blogging gig at The Washington Monthly. His new blog “Political Animal”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/, is front and center at the magazine’s site and promptly takes the place of “Calpundit”:http://www.calpundit.com/ in the Top Five.
So, should we expect something different from Kevin now that he’s actually getting paid? In his case, no, since someone _should_ have been paying him for his excellent punditry before now. Kevin’s one of the rare bloggers whose output is both voluminous and substantive; I can’t fathom the time and energy he happily donated to us all while writing Calpundit. For me — and for most bloggers, I suspect — there’s a limit to the time and effort we’ll spend on something that isn’t a paying gig. There’s been plenty of times I’ve stopped working on an entry and just posted the dang thing, though I certainly would have kept toiling had I been on the clock. In general, then, I think we certainly ought to expect more from paid bloggers than unpaid ones. I thought of this first when reading “Josh Marshall’s”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ coverage of the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. He collected donations from readers in order to cover the event specifically for the blog, which struck me as a cool idea. But ultimately that coverage was pretty lackluster — had I made a donation, I would have been disappointed. (On balance, though, Josh is every bit as pay-worthy as Kevin is.)
* Congratulations are also in order for “John and Belle”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/, who have become regular contributors to “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org. I’m happy for them, but insofar as this means a reduction of material on J&BHAB, I’m also disappointed. A big part of their charm is having them on their own site, with two distinct voices and the occasional interplay between their entries. Call me persnickety, but reading their stuff mixed in with the rest of the CT crew just won’t be the same.
* “Wonkette”:http://www.wonkette.com/ has been promoted to the Top Five. I find myself laughing out loud almost every time I read it. And while I have no idea if the drawing on the masthead resembles the real Ana Marie Cox, I have a crush on . . . the drawing, I guess. Man, that’s weird.
* There are two newcomers this time around. “A Coqui in Winterfell”:http://winterfell.blogs.com/anacoqui/ belongs to Ana Canino-Fluit, who’s giving this blogging thing a try by trying to post something new every day for the first month. “little more than a placeholder”:http://james.anthropiccollective.org/ is also going in the friends section, though it’s something of a borderline case. I’ve only met James once, and briefly at that, so most of what I know about him I know from his blog. But he’s engaged to “Kari”:http://kari.anthropiccollective.org/, which is how I met him in the first place. Either way, he’s a great source for British news and perspective, and has been on a roll the past couple weeks, with entries full of meaty goodness showing up every day.
* Rather than try to keep up with “Ed’s”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org ever-changing titles for his blog, I’m just listing his name in the ‘roll from now own. But I have to say that his current title is my favorite so far.