It's very simple, really: it's all about what we want the (left) hemiblogosphere to be. It's about what we value here. As I said a year ago,
What's at stake here is the egalitarian and democratic nature of the blogosphere. If traffic and linkage are concentrated among a relatively few extremely popular blogs, then the vast majority are effectively shut out of the conversation.And what get shut out are diverse and distinctive voices--exactly the thing I consider our strongest asset. There are very few sites I visit because they have information others don't (TPM comes to mind); I read blogs mostly for the individual voices of the bloggers there. I read them for the amused outrage (and the beer talk and river pictures) of Pygalgia, and the thoughtful commentary of Bulworth; the crazed eloquence of Randal Graves, and the analytical snark of Grace Nearing; and of course the inimitable rap stylings of Anthony Cartouche. It's thousands of blogs I haven't discovered yet.
I don't blame anyone for blogospheric consolidation; I think it's pretty much inevitable. Bloggers have the right to link to whichever and however many (or few) blogs they want to. Obviously. Smaller bloggers can't presume to tell the mega-bloggers what to do. What we can do is tend to our own gardens; we can try to make our own little patches of the blogosphere resemble our vision for the blogosphere as a whole.
Which is why I'm celebrating Blogroll Amnesty Day.
(More at Skippy and Jon Swift. If you know of any small bloggers we should be reading but aren't (including your own, of course), post links in comments.)
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