Extortion just won’t work, especially when the threat is so tantalizing. Greg Laden tries to get me to join in this thinking blog meme by telling me I’ll get a basement full of snakes if I don’t participate. Bring ’em on, I say. Gimme my snakes!
Belated blogiversary greetings to Norwegianity!
Some people have taken blogroll amnesty day the wrong way—or perhaps it has been used in the wrong way. Jon Swift registers the impression that this was an undemocratic purge that simply re-enthroned the same old elites and tossed the little guys on the scrapheap.
But the more I learned about this Amnesty Day, the more I realized that it was a very strange amnesty indeed. The amnesty he granted turned out to be amnesty for himself [Atrios]. He wanted to assuage himself of the guilt he might feel at kicking blogs off his blogroll instead of granting amnesty to others to swarm across the border into his domain. “Everyone feels a wee bit guilty about removing blogs from their blogroll, so they’re hesitant to add new ones to an ever-expanding list,” he explained. So Atrios deleted his entire blogroll and disappointingly repopulated it for the most part with the usual suspects. Then others in the liberal blogosphere followed his example, including Jesus’ General and PZ Myers at Pharyngula, who already takes a very Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach to blogrolling. Then Markos at Daily Kos joined this ruthless bloodletting. “It sucks and it feels bad,” he said, daubing the tears from his eyes as he typed. So the end result of Atrios’ Amnesty Day was to make some blogrolls smaller and even more exclusive than they already were.
Uh-oh. This is precisely the antithesis of why I thought the amnesty was a good idea: we shouldn’t take the A-listers for granted and just put them on the list because everyone else does, but should instead critically evaluate all of them. I like Atrios’s site, for instance, and browse it regularly because he seems to be an excellent and responsive weathervane for issues that might be of interest to me…but it’s all those smaller sites that put a little more care into more substantive or quirkier posts that I appreciate more.
For instance, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo thought I’d dropped him in the revamp. No way, man—that’s a much more fun site to read on lefty political issues than what Atrios does. Besides, I’ve got the t-shirt. I think that means we’re in a committed relationship at this point. Oh, and Skippy, I’ve never been on Atrios’s or Kos’s blogrolls myself—we’re just going to have to settle for each other.
I should also explain that Jon Swift has the wrong impression of my blogroll policy. It isn’t quite as brutal as he supposes; I’m extremely liberal about adding new blogs to it, and although I do drop blogs that are abandoned by their owners for a month or more, I’m also quick to add brand new ones that I find, and do so on at least a weekly basis. That’s how my complete blogroll has grown to 405 blogs at last count (and which I could never handle without my NetNewsWire to manage everything).
I have and always will consider linking to be a way to break out of stale hierarchies, and I hope no one gets the idea that I would want to use them to lock out fresh ideas.
At last, a science blogger who lives somewhere even more remote and colder than Morris.
Atrios has declared today to be Blogroll Amnesty Day, a time to purge those tired old links to sites that you’ve always got up on your page, but that maybe contain a few blogs you’ve grown tired of, or lacks the sites that you’ve been browsing recently. It’s a fine idea; if you feel like clearing boring ol’ Pharyngula off your list, go ahead, I won’t cry too much. It would be nice if you replaced it with some fresh new place that you like very much, of course.
I personally police my blogroll about once a week—I build it from the opml file from my newsreader, so I’m regularly adding new sites to it, and I’m fairly ruthless about deleting blogs that have no new content for 30 days.
Well, heck, Darren Naish has been posting here for a week, so it’s past time to give a belated welcome to Tetrapod Zoology, the latest addition to the Scienceblogs family of fine sci-punditry.
He must be a smart guy: he just picked Amanda Marcotte to run the John Edwards blog. And since Amanda will be slightly distracted, she’s brought in five (it takes five people to take Amanda’s place?) new people to keep Pandagon humming…and one of them is Chris Clarke. Everything’s shuffling around! I’m getting confused! I think I’m willing to vote for Edwards so far, as long as Amanda keeps him in line and makes sure he doesn’t start pumping up the war talk or professing for creationism.
You all recall the Beagle Project that I recently mentioned was trying to raise money to reconstruct the Beagle and sail off to Patagonia (with me hiding belowdecks, of course). Miss Prism had a terrific idea: she’s knitting a Darwin puppet that she’ll sell off to some lucky commenter on Darwin’s birthday, with all the proceeds sent off to build the Beagle.
I should get in on this, although I have no talent for knitting. Any suggestions? Is there some little personal Pharyngula tchotchke I could convince people to bid on, knowing that their pennies would go to the construction of a boat? I was thinking that one possibility would be to draw a cartoon about the lovable character, Squidbert, and get the Dilbonians lining up to buy it so they could put it on the web for mocking/savaging purposes (since I have no talent for cartooning, either, that would be easy to do.) It seems a little unfair to give those baying hounds a bit of red meat to sate their appetites, when others here are more deserving of reward. Make suggestions, and I’ll see what I can do.
One of the great developments I’m seeing is the emergence of specialized weblogs that focus hard on a specific issue, and here’s an example: the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. There’s good science there on a topic of considerable importance. Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say.
I’m going to be interviewed tonight by Karl Mogel for his Mindcast podcast. I’m not sure how this is going to work; I think it’ll just be made available at some later date. Maybe he’ll pop in and explain how you can listen to it. I do know you can find past episodes in the iTunes store.
He promised me he’d ask some hard questions, and also some hard questions of his other guest, the illustrious Ken Miller. We won’t be on the same segment, sorry…there could be some vigorous argument if we were, and poor Karl might not be able to get in a word edgewise. It is an interesting combination, though: the extremely helpful and well-regarded speaker and biologist who is also an apologist for religion, and the pirate evilutionist with a knife between his teeth who brooks no compromise in his war against religion. We’ll have to see what Karl does with the possibilities.
